May 16, 2024
In what one
observer called “a whole new level of insanity and paranoia,” renowned Israeli
historian and professor Ilan Pappé — a staunch critic of Zionism — was detained
and interrogated this week by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents as he
entered the United States at Detroit’s airport.
In a Wednesday
Facebook post, Pappé said that he was questioned by F.B.I. agents for two hours
after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on Monday.
He wrote:
“The two-men team were not abusive or rude, I should
say, but their questions were really out of the world! Am I a Hamas supporter?
Do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? What is the solution to the
‘conflict’ (seriously this is what they asked!) Who are my Arab and Muslim
friends in America… What kind of relationship [do] I have with them?”
“They had [a]
long phone conversation with someone, the Israelis?” he added, “and after
copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter.”
“I know many of
you have fared far worse,” Pappé wrote, referring to Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a
British Palestinian plastic surgeon and rector of Glasgow University in
Scotland who last month was denied entry to Germany — and by extension all 29
Schengen Area nations — before the ban was overturned earlier this week.
“The good news
is — actions like this by the USA or European countries taken under pressure
from the pro-Israeli lobby or Israel itself smell of sheer panic and
desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state, with all
the implications of such a status,” he added.
Pappé’s
treatment sparked outrage among Palestine defenders.
“The detention
and interrogation of internationally renowned Israeli anti-Zionist historian
Ilan Pappé at Detroit airport by the F.B.I. is latest in the long list of
episodes of intimidation and bullying across the West to defend the
indefensible — the Israeli genocide of Palestinians,” University of California,
Berkeley history professor Ussama Makdisi said on social media Wednesday.
Entrepreneur and
geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand said, “We’ve reached a whole new level
of insanity and paranoia.”
Pappé, 69, is a
scholar of Palestinian history at the University of Exeter in England. He’s
published over 20 books including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, an
examination of the Nakba expulsion of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine by
Zionist militants — who sometimes massacred Palestinians to sow terror among
them — during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in the late
1940s.
He has also been
a leading Israeli critic of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which according
to Palestinian officials has killed, maimed, or left missing more than 125,000
people since the Oct. 7 attacks. During a Wednesday interview with Al Jazeera
marking the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, Pappé asserted that Israel’s current
onslaught is “even worse” than the 1948-49 ethnic cleansing in many ways.
“What we see now
are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in
order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza,” he said. “Ethnic
cleansing is a terrible crime against humanity but genocide is even worse.”
Pappé’s latest
title, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, details “how
pro-Israel lobbying groups influence the Middle East policies of Britain, the
U.S., and others.”
Reacting to the
author’s detention, ACLU human rights lawyer and New York University professor
Jamil Dakwar said, “One wonders if this ‘VIP welcome’ related to his
anti-genocide activism and his new book.”
No comments:
Post a Comment