HOT OFF THE PRESS ~~ CHOMSKY DENIED ENTRY TO ISRAEL

Desert Peace

Noam Chomsky denied entry to Israel

Left-wing American Jewish intellectual known as fierce critic of Jewish state detained for four hours while trying to enter country through Allenby Bridge in order to deliver lecture in Ramallah, sources at Birzeit University report

Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the prominent speakers against the Israeli policy, was stopped Sunday while trying to enter Israel through the Allenby Bridge, sources in the Birzeit University in Ramallah told Ynet.

According to the officials, Chomsky was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the university and was detained at the border crossing for more than four hours. A human rights activists who was with Chomsky at the crossing confirmed that the 81-year-old linguist was not allowed to enter Israel.

The American radical political activist was slated to visit the territories as a guest of the university and Palestinian lawmaker Mustafa Barghouti, president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

According to Barghouti, security sources at Allenby Bridge told Chomsky that he would not be allowed to enter Israel following an order issued by senior Israeli Interior Ministry officials due to his political opinions.

Barghouti, one of the leaders of the struggle against Israel, was slated to accompany Chomsky on his tour of the West Bank and separation fence. He said that “Israel’s decision testifies to its racist nature. Even a person like Chomsky couldn’t avoid it. We are proud of Chomsky’s role in supporting the Palestinians and the struggle against the injustice of the occupation.”

The American intellectual was scheduled to deliver a lecture on the “liberalism in industrialized European societies.”

Won’t speak in Birzeit. Chomsky (Archive photo: AP)

Chomsky, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a fierce critic of the Jewish state. In March, Chomsky called on US citizens to confront Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians.

“Over time, the apparatus of Israeli control has become more sophisticated and effective in affecting Palestinian life,” said Chomsky, a noted author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus. Israel has finally begun to adopt the South African policy of what they call ‘indigenization of repression,’” he said.

Addressing the comparison between Israel and South Africa, Chomsky said, “It’s not exactly like the South African apartheid. In some respects it’s not as bad, but in some respects it’s worse.”

“For decades, Israel has been killing and kidnapping civilians in Lebanon…bringing them to Israel, imprisoning them, keeping them as hostages…but two Israel soldiers are captured at the border (and it) justifies a US invasion,” he said. “It’s a comment of us and what we go along with.”

Chomsky criticized US foreign policy toward Israel but stressed it could also use its power abroad to lessen the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The world works like the mafia,” he said. “There is the don, or us (the United States), and when the don says not do something, you don’t do it.”

Anat Shalev and Shmulik Grossman contributed to this report

How Israel operates as an apartheid state

War In Context
by Paul Woodward on April 28, 2010

In a talk delivered to the Fifth Bilin International Conference for Palestinian Popular Resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21, Jonathan Cook described some of the aspects of Israeli apartheid — the systematic discrimination between Jews and non-Jews inside the state of Israel.

A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion University in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew.” For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab.” For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli.” That is precisely why Professor Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis.” It is a hugely important fight – and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?

Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfillment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state,” it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals.” Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.

This differentiation in citizenship is recognized in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.

That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic, and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.