This is a column about Israel’s appalling treatment of a Columbia University professor, Katherine Franke, detained for 14 hours at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and then deported, but before I get to that a few observations about the incandescent situation in Israel-Palestine. President Trump’s gift for unleashing the worst in people has found no more fertile ground than the Holy Land.
I wrote three months ago that it’s time for Mahmoud Abbas to go; it’s still time. The Palestinian leader has now veered into anti-Semitic tropes worthy of a beer hall in late 1930s Berlin. Jews as usurers is not the stuff on which a state of Palestine will be built.
The Trump administration’s foray into the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, set to culminate May 14 with the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem but yet to yield a plan, has been a fiasco. America’s embrace of Israel has been so total that the term “occupied territories” tends to be discouraged in official references to the West Bank. Greater Israel is O.K. in the White House.
Abbas is a bitter old man. He has no feel for the struggle of young Palestinians, like those demonstrating along the Gaza border in marches organized by Hamas. More than 40 Palestinians have been killed, shot by Israeli snipers over the past month. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the United States is “fully supportive” of Israelis’ “right to defend themselves.” Yes, Israel has that right, but not the right to use lethal force against mainly unarmed Palestinian civilians, who also have rights, including to liberty and opportunity.
Here is where we return to Katherine Franke, who is a Columbia Law School professor and was co-heading a delegation of American civil rights leaders when she was detained last Sunday, interrogated, accused of lying, and, upon expulsion, told she could never return.
Israel displays such high-handedness in part because it has carte blanche from the Trump administration to do what it will: view the West Bank as Israel proper, overreact at the Gaza fence, pass a 2017 law banning boycott supporters from the country. Habits of violent intolerance absorbed through a 50-year exercise in policing the lives of others no longer meet any semblance of American censure. Unbridled, Israel lurches rightward.
Franke told me: “They were not interested in why I was there. They already had a story. I was a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace. I was there to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — all this untrue. It quickly ramped up to where the guy was yelling at me for lying. He Googled my name and came up with right-wing trolling sites like Canary Mission or AMCHA that push out ugly stuff about faculty held to be enemies of Israel.” How is it, Franke asked, that “Israel delegates to right-wing trolls the job of determining who should be admitted to Israel?”
Franke has visited Israel a half-dozen times before. She supervises dissertations by graduate students there. She had meetings scheduled with civil rights advocates. She has worked on the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and generally she supports its aims but is not a leader of it. A critic of Israel’s human rights record, she has boycotted conferences paid for by the Israeli government, but has participated in other academic conferences in Israel. Faculty members at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University have told her they are going to write to express their outrage.
In other words, she’s the kind of tough critic a free and democratic society should welcome. Any healthy society is defined by its ability to accommodate civilized debate, not by cries of “traitor” directed at dissenters. Sending her and Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, back to America was a measure of how far Israeli political culture has closed.
Franke told me the reaction from Columbia had been “disappointing.” Although she informed the law school dean and the provost of her detention, no one asked whether she got out the country safely, and no statement was issued from the university. The law school dean’s chief of staff informed her, she told me, that “because there are pro-Israeli centers at the law school” the school “would not get involved in defending” her.
When I contacted Columbia, Lee Bollinger, the President, sent this statement to me: “I think it is wrong for a country to deny entry to a visitor because of his or her political beliefs. I strongly disagree with the idea of boycotting Israeli academics and institutions …but I also think that the government of Israel should not deny academics or others access to the country simply because they hold and express that viewpoint. The future of academic freedom is best secured through exchange of people and ideas, not by establishing barriers.”
Bollinger was in Israel just before Franke. Columbia is in preliminary talks to establish a Global Center in Tel Aviv. It has opened others in Istanbul, Amman and Mumbai, among other locations. The Tel Aviv project should hinge on Israel’s commitment to the open “exchange of people and ideas,” and its rejection of the nationalist intolerance Franke encountered and that Trump’s carte blanche has encouraged.
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