- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Glenn, there are persistent rumors (on Finkelstein's own sight and on Democracy Now) that Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpa author Norman Finkelstein has been detained upon entry to Israel and that he will be deported from there for "security reasons".
This follows a major campaign of harassment of Finkelstein by Dershowitz and his followers (who basically managed to keep him from getting tenure at DePaul).
In a way, this has taken the harassment of American dissent about the Israel/Middle East situation up a notch: Jews are hardly ever prohibited from traveling to Israel (what with being automatically entitled to citizenship on grounds of religion). So far I've only heard of Jewish ISM members being turned away - and great care has (to date) been taken about the treatment of U.S. citizens, with the exception of Palestinians.
If anything, this indicates that the separation of political spheres between Israel and the U.S. is shrinking, and that a respected academic who gets hounded here by Dershowitz and affiliates also gets turned away by Israeli officials at the border. It seems to indicate that either U.S. citizenship doesn't count as much anymore for Israel's border patrol (not very likely) or that the border patrol is following a particular political theme (very likely).
Link on the sig - this story is last on yesterday's DN headline page (and hasn't yet been picked up by the Israeli media - although some Israeli journalists are trying to confirm the rumors; but the authorities aren't talking to them, on account of the Sabbath.)
