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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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China also culturally out-muscles the universe of Xinjiang's culturally-compatible neighbors. Israel does not. Egypt alone is a cultural powerhouse in film and television, and the rest of the Arabic-speaking world is producing mountains of music and TV and literature. They'd have to cut off the Palestinians from the outside world on a permanent basis to avoid outside influences.

Don’t know about music, but mountains of literature, definitely not.

In 1991: 102,000 new books published in North America; 6,500 in the Arab world.

In 2022, Israel published 6971 books, so about as much as the entire arab world.

Reports and studies have shown significantly low reading levels in the Arab world. The average reading time for an Arab child is six minutes a year compared with 12,000 minutes in the West, according to the Arab Thought Foundation’s Arab Report for Cultural Development. The reading rate of an Arab individual is a quarter of a page a year compared with 11 books in the US and seven books in the UK, according to a study conducted by the Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt.

In the 1980s, number of books translated per million people, per five years: Arab world 4.4, Hungary 519, Spain 920 .

In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma’moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books - equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year (Shawki Galal, in Arabic, 1999, 87)

Spain isn't really relevant here. How many books are written by Uyghur authors outside China? Or by authors speaking mutually intelligible languages from similar cultural groups.

Without running a full prison, you can't cut Israeli Arabs off from the rest of the Arab world and their cultural products.