The Guardian/Chip Gibbons/23/5/2024
It shows how much Israel really controls America – Mark
On Monday, 13 May, the Israeli historian and professor Ilan Pappé landed in Detroit, Michigan. Upon his arrival, agents from the US Department of Homeland Security detained and interrogated him for two hours. According to Pappé, DHS asked him whether he was a Hamas supporter, whether he believed Israel was committing genocide and what his “solution” to the Middle East conflict was. Agents also reportedly asked him to identify “his Arab and Muslim friends in America”.
During his interrogation, DHS agents held a long phone conversation, which Pappé speculated may have been with Israeli officials. Pappé was eventually admitted to the US, but only after DHS copied the entire contents of his cellphone. (Initially, Pappé reported he had been interrogated by the FBI; he has since clarified that it was agents of the DHS.)
Pappé is a respected academic known for his scholarship arguing that the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba was a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing central to Israel’s creation. Pappé is also known for his anti-Zionist politics. There is nothing to suggest any connection between Pappé and Hamas.
In the US, however, counter-terrorism authorities are often deployed to surveil political speech. Opponents of Palestinian rights both within and outside government frequently conflate political views they dislike with terrorism. This demonizes supporters of Palestinian rights in the public sphere and paves the way for the type of government harassment to which the DHS subjected Pappé. Such actions are part of both the McCarthyite atmosphere those with pro-Palestinian politics face and the broader history of political policing in the US.
During the first half of the 20th century, a political policing apparatus crystalized in the US. Local police developed anti-communist “red squads”, the FBI developed a sprawling domestic intelligence program targeting “subversives” and congressional committees investigated “un-American activities” and threats to “internal security”. Many of these bodies predated the cold war, but their brand of zealous anti-communism received a tremendous boost thanks to the cold war.
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