In Sep­tem­ber 1982, the Israeli mil­i­tary invad­ed West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese mili­ti­a­men mas­sa­cred Pales­tini­ans in the Sabra and Shati­la refugee camps. Mean­while, Israeli forces also raid­ed the Pales­tine Lib­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion Research Cen­ter and trucked its com­plete library to Israel. Pales­tin­ian activists and sup­port­ers protest­ed loud­ly to inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions and the West­ern press, claim­ing that the assault on the Cen­ter proved that the Israelis sought to destroy not mere­ly Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants but Pales­tin­ian cul­ture as well. The protests suc­ceed­ed: in Novem­ber 1983, Israel returned the library as part of a pris­on­er exchange. What was in that library?

Much of the expan­sive col­lec­tion the PLO amassed con­sist­ed of books about Judaism, Zion­ism, and Israel. In Read­ing Her­zl in Beirut, Jonathan Marc Gri­betz tells the sto­ry of the PLO Research Cen­ter from its estab­lish­ment in 1965 until its ulti­mate expul­sion from Lebanon in 1983. Gri­betz explores why the PLO invest­ed in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zion­ism, and how the knowl­edge they acquired informed the PLO’s rela­tion­ship to Israel.