The 81-year-old American scholar Noam Chomsky will deliver his pla
nned lecture to Bir Zeit by videoconference, after he was denied entry to the West Bank by the Israeli Ministry of Interior on Sunday. Chomsky was travelling from Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, when he was interrogated for four hours before being turned back.
Haaretz newspaper reported today that, despite remarks by various Israeli officials, there was no official guarantee that he would be admitted if he presented himself at the border a second time. Chomsky reportedly said that he felt the Israeli authorities were “playing games”.
Haaretz — but no Palestinian media — reported that Chomsky also spoke over the phone with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who reportedly indicated that he “strongly condemns the decision of the occupying forces to prevent Chomsky from entering Palestinian land”. This report can be read in full here.
Well, as we used to say in New York, that and a subway token will get you … a ride on the subway.
Bradley Burston wrote in his column (it seems now to be called a “blog”) in Haaretz today, here, that “No one knows fascism better than Israelis. They are schooled, drilled in the history, the mechanics, the horrendous potential of fascist regimes. Israelis know fascism when they see it. In others … And it would take denial, inertia, selective memory, a sense that things – bad as they are – can go on like this indefinitely, for fascism to be able gain its foothold in a country founded in its very blood trail … In fact, it has taken the most dysfunctional, the most rudderless government Israel has ever known, to make moderates uncomfortably aware of the countless but largely cosmetized ways in which the right in Israel and its supporters abroad have come to plant and nurture the seeds of fascism”.
Among the arguments that Burston mustered were these:
“We have grown desensitized to the consequences of actively denying basic staples and construction supplies to 1.5 million people in Gaza, many of them still waiting to rebuild homes we destroyed. We have grown inured to the appropriation of Palestinian-owned West Bank land, to abusive treatment of law-abiding Palestinians at checkpoints, to the ill-treatment and summary expulsion of foreign workers, to racist, anti-democratic and, yes, fascistic rulings by extreme rightist rabbis, especially some of those holding official positions in the West Bank”.
and
” ‘There are a million reasons why someone would be denied entry into Israel’, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad said Monday, when asked about the ministry’s border policies in the wake of the Chomsky ban. ‘There may be a million reasons, but try to find a single criterion for entry refusal and you’ll hit a blank wall’, said Association for Civil Rights in Israel attorney Oded Feller. ‘The Interior Ministry simply doesn’t publish them, despite a court ruling that ordered them to do so.”
[n.b. – This is also reported in the Jerusalem Post, which adds this phrase attributed to Ms. Haddad: “Every case stands alone, and every individual who is denied entry is denied for different reasons” she said. The JPost also reported more fully on Oded Feller’s remarks, adding that “Feller said that while cases like Chomsky’s grabbed the public’s attention because of his reputation and stature, the reality was that Israel denied entry to people who held similar beliefs and opinions as a matter of fact. ‘Chomsky made headlines because of his fame, but foreign human rights activists, peace activists, political leaders, not to mention Palestinians and their relatives, are denied entry on a regular basis’, he said … ‘The truth is that without a permanent presence at all border crossings, there is no way of knowing precisely how many people are denied and for what reasons’, said Feller. ‘What we do know is that in December 2007, the Jerusalem District Court handed down an order that the Interior Ministry publish all of its regulations, and that the ministry has yet to do so’. The court order was the result of repeated and unsuccessful attempts by ACRI and other human rights groups to gain access to the Interior Ministry’s regulations and working procedures, among them those that determined the criteria for accepting or rejecting the entrance of foreign nationals. In her verdict, District Court Judge Yehudit Tzur wrote that ‘the facts of the case clearly show that for years, the respondent [the Interior Ministry] has been in breach of the law by not publishing the rules and regulations according to which it operates its various authorities. As can be noticed, this improper behavior has been going on for years, with the respondent disobeying both the written law and previous court rulings’. At the end of her ruling, Tzur ordered the ministry to provide the plaintiffs with access to the regulations, to place written, up-to-date copies of the regulations in every population control bureau and to publish the regulations on the ministry’s Web site. ‘Believe me, I’ve turned every stone and dug through the Web site very thoroughly, and I have not been able to find the regulations that determine entrance refusal. It’s still not on the records’, said Feller. The only regulation that appears on the Interior Ministry’s Web site that says anything about the refusal to grant foreign nationals entry at border crossings states that if a border control representative determines that the visitor is entering Israel for the purpose of employment or for any other unlawful reason, and not for the purpose of a visit, his or her entry will be denied. The regulation states that the border control representative will decide on the spot whether the denial of entry is valid for future visits as well. The regulation states that a person denied entry will be expelled immediately, and if it is not possible, the person will be held in a holding facility until expulsion is possible. ‘I’m really angry that this whole story is being blamed on a single mistake made by a junior official at the border or one authority blaming the other’, said Feller. ‘In reality, we are talking about a common and regular occurrence. To the best of my knowledge, there is only one state of Israel, and it has one formal policy’.” See the full JPost article ]
and
“There will be those who argue that the fact that I, or my Haaretz colleagues, are allowed to publish what we do, is proof that there is no fascism here, nor evidence of a police state. The fact is that were we not Israeli Jews, and part of an establishment institution, any of us could find ourselves tossed out on the same pavement, and with the same lack of due process and due explanation, as Noam Chomsky”.
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Meanwhile, Philip Weiss posts today on his blog, mondoweiss, here on a New York Times article here that says “A fierce debate broke out in Israel on Monday amid finger pointing and hand wringing over the country’s refusal to permit the linguist Noam Chomsky, an icon of the American left, to enter the West Bank from Jordan”. Weiss comments that this NYT article then rushed “to assure readers of the New York Times that Israel goofed on the Chomsky denial” … and Weiss asks “Wouldn’t it be fair to ask Malsin, Prado, Falk and Finkelstein if Israel is telling the truth about those disgraceful actions?”
This NYTimes article, written from Jerusalem by Ethan Bronner, adds this: “Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Netanyahu said, ‘There is no change in our policy. The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority”. Regev suggested that if Chomsky tried to enter Israel again, he would succeed”.
Richard Silverstein also posted on the same NYTimes article, on his blog, Tikkun Olam, hereand commented: “People who are writing about this incident are getting it wrong when they say Chomsky was denied entry to Israel. He was denied entry to the West Bank, which is not Israel. Israel should have no right to determine who enters Palestinian territory via the Allenby Bridge. This should be controlled by the PA”. And, Silverstein wrote: “I think Israel punished the 81 year old Chomsky enough interrogating him for 4 hours after he’d made the trek from Boston to Amman and thence to the Allenby Bridge. Why would he want to be put through this nonsense again just to enable Israel to say it did the right thing (finally) by admitting him?”
Silverstein noted that an Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper has reported: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that he had learned of the decision not to allow Noam Chomsky to enter Israel from the press…’We read about it in the paper’, Netanyahu said during a Knesset session”. Silverstein then commented: “This is a classic case of passing the buck as far down the line as you can go. Was the decision to bar the eminent Dr. Chomsky made my a senior official? Hell no, Israel always allows junior officers manning a desk at the Allenby Bridge to make such judgments independently”…