I was detained at a US airport and asked about Israel and Gaza for 2 hours. Why?
I’m an Israeli historian living in the UK, best known for my books on the history of Palestine and the Middle East, which challenge the official Israeli version of history. This month I was invited to the US by a new Arab American organization, alNadwa (the Discussion), to share my thoughts on the situation in the Gaza Strip. I also addressed a Jewish Voice for Peace group in Michigan and went to talk to students encamped at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
After an eight-hour flight from Heathrow I was stopped on arrival at Detroit airport by two people who I thought were agents of the FBI, though I later found out they were agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Two men approached me, flashed their badges and demanded I accompany them into a side room.
My initial attempt to find out why I was stopped was disregarded. It was clear that the agents were asking the questions and my role was to answer them, and not the other way around. So until today, at least officially, I did not receive any explanation for the incident.
I was held for two hours. The first round of questions was about my views on Hamas. Then the agents wished to know whether I thought Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip amount to genocide and what I think of the slogan “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea”. I said yes, I do think Israel is committing genocide. As to the slogan, I said that in my view people anywhere in the world should be free.
Then the agents interrogated me about who I know in the Arab American and Muslim American community. They asked me to provide them with telephone numbers, took my phone away for quite a long period and asked to wait until they made some phone calls before they let me go.
The point of sharing this experience is not to ask for compassion or even solidarity; there are far worst ordeals in life. But the incident was still troubling – and part of a much larger and more serious phenomenon. Why are ostensibly liberal and democratic countries so interested in profiling or restricting academics who are trying to share our professionally informed views about Israel and Gaza with the North American and European public?
Consider the refusals of both France and Germany to allow Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, the rector of the University of Glasgow, to attend events similar to the ones I attended in the US. In addition to his academic post, Abu Sitta has practiced as a physician in Gaza and is able to provide first-hand testimony about what is happening there on the ground. Human Rights Watch noted that the ban on Abu Sitta, reportedly instigated by Germany, “attempts to prevent him from sharing his experience treating patients in Gaza [and] risks undermining Germany’s commitment to protect and facilitate freedom of expression and assembly and to nondiscrimination”.
For my part, I have written more than 20 books about Israel and Palestine, and wished to provide historical and scholarly context to the current situation. Many other well-known and well-versed academics who can provide in-depth analysis, which is not always to be found in the mainstream media, are also affected by the threat or possibility of travel restrictions.
This is a serious issue of academic freedom and freedom of expression. Ironically, in most other contexts, academics are more likely to encounter barriers to free speech in the global south, not the global north. On the topic of Palestine, the situation is reversed. Knowing that, it makes sense that it probably could only have been a state from the global south, such as South Africa, that would dare to approach the international court of justice to seek an injunction against the genocide that Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip.
These travel restrictions have very little to do with knowledge. The American and British governments rarely ever consult any expert who is not Israeli or pro-Israeli about the nature of the conflict in Israel/Palestine and the brutal Israeli policies of the last 76 years.
The British prime minister, for example, has met a Jewish student union since 7 October but shuns any meeting with Palestinian students, many of whom have lost their whole families in Gaza. Antisemitism definitions, such as those outlined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, are weaponized to silence any show of solidarity with the Palestinians. Rishi Sunak might have learned why the slogan “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea” is not idiotic or extremist, as he recently suggested, had he been willing to learn and listen.
Why are we here? I recently finished writing a book titled Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. In the process I learned that only detailed historical research, which, alas, ended in a rather long book, can explain North American and European politicians’ Pavlovian responses to people’s attempts to exercise their speech rights on the Palestinian struggle.
The longevity of the lobby in the US and UK pre-empts any free discussion on Israel and Palestine, even in the academy. Given Britain’s past responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe and its present complicity in the crimes committed against Palestinians, this continued repression of free speech prevents a just solution in Israel and Palestine and will put Britain on the wrong side of history. I hope the US, the UK and their allies will change course and prove my prediction wrong.
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies
The longevity of the lobby in the US and UK pre-empts any free discussion on Israel and Palestine, even in the academy
to become increasingly insular. Khamenei is concerned about succession and wants to ensure that he is replaced by someone who will carry on the same policy and strategy. Every cycle of selecting members of the Assembly of Experts, the deliberative body that selects the supreme leader and over which Khamenei exerts significant influence, has brought in an increasingly hardening core of Khamenei loyalists.
The US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and its assassination of the IRGC senior commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020 only confirmed to Khamenei that the survival of the regime depended on weeding out divergence and on projecting an image of defiance to a west that cannot be trusted. This is why he tasked Raisi with crushing the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, and why in the last parliamentary elections in March 2024, hardliners won the majority of seats.
The Iranian regime has gone too far towards tightening control and insularity to reverse tack. Any compromise risks showing the supreme leader as weak. With Israel continuing to expose Iran’s military vulnerabilities through its strategic attacks on Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, as well as through the symbolic attack on Isfahan last month, the regime in Iran is on high alert about infiltration. This is not the time for a hardline regime to soften its grip or extend its hands to anyone but ultra-loyalists.
That said, the exact figure who will take the position is still unclear. Raisi’s elimination from the picture and increased regime insularity could boost Khamenei’s son Mojtaba’s chances of taking over. Some observers think that the Iranian regime shuns nepotism because it wants to distance itself from monarchism. But Raisi’s widow is the daughter of a member of the Assembly of Experts who is known for being a staunch Khamenei supporter (and also a possible supreme leader candidate), while Soleimani’s daughter Zeinab is married to the son of the chief of Hezbollah’s executive council, Hashem Safieddine; Safieddine is also the maternal cousin of Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah.
If anything, the death of Raisi should serve to expedite a decision on succession in Iran. But it will not cause a change in political direction for the country, neither internationally nor domestically. With fewer people around to trust, the Iranian regime’s inner circle will continue to shrink, with the clerical and military elements of the regime fusing together more solidly than ever before.
Lina Khatib is director of the Soas Middle East Institute and associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House
science that many anti-war Americans will feel when they consider whether to vote for Biden in spite of his support for the genocide in Gaza. And they are certainly not justifications for
Biden’s continued aid to Israel’s war project. Rather, the extreme dangers of a second Trump presidency are all the more cause for Biden to abandon this support, and to align himself with the moral cause championed by the voters he needs.
On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.
Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist