Outrage at airport

Professor Ilan Pappe was in Detroit for a series of public conversations about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and what we can do to stop it. The events were packed. But upon his arrival he was detained at the airport by the F.B.I. The agents questioned him for two hours, wanting to know about his Arab and Muslim friends, and if he was a supporter of Hamas. They took his cell phone and copied the contents. He wrote of the encounter in a Facebook post saying:

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 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."

Professor Pappe is an internationally celebrated scholar and activist. He is a citizen of Israel, born to German Jewish parents who fled the Nazis in the 1930’s. He is a leading critic of the Israeli occupation and has written several books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge.

He is actively engaged in efforts to expand our understanding of the history of this moment. He said recently:

I think what we are seeing now, what unfolds in front of our eyes, is a genocidal situation, by which people are targeted, whether they are children, babies, in hospital or in schools. And this is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation. The pretext for that kind of savagery is revenge for what the Hamas did on the 7th of October, but I think the real intention here is not just revenge but trying to exploit what happened on the 7th of October to create new realities in historical Palestine. You called it a new Nakba. I think that this is — the Nakba has never really ended for the Palestinians, so it’s a new horrific chapter in the ongoing Nakba that the Palestinians are suffering here. So, this is a really horrific situation that can only be stopped from the outside, because there is no motivation inside Israel to stop the operations, nor to care more about the lives of innocent people, despite what the Israeli army claims to do in the field itself.

It is this insistence that we think historically and that we recognize the importance of building support for peace outside of Israel that makes him dangerous in the eyes of the F.B.I.

Pappe’s response to the detention was a recognition that it was a small inconvenience, especially compared to what so many others are suffering. But he also understood that such actions by the State to intimidate is a reflection “of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status.”

As news of the detention spread, scholars and activists have responded with outrage.

"The detention and interrogation of internationally renowned Israeli anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé at Detroit airport by the FBI 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….

Commentator Arnaud Bertrand said, "We've reached a whole new level of insanity and paranoia."

City and State officials should join in the condemnation of the FBI’s actions. We encourage all people of good will to express their concerns to those who presume to have authority to stop and detain people.

We know that as power losses its grip, it turns to violence. This violence must be identified and denounced. This is the only way to find sanity.