ISRAEL:NORMAN FINKELSTEIN, the controversial Jewish-American academic and fierce critic of Israel, has been deported from the country and banned from the Jewish state for 10 years, it emerged yesterday.
Mr Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has accused Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians, was detained by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, when he landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Friday.
Shin Bet interrogated him for about 24 hours about his contact with the Lebanese Islamic militia Hizbullah when he travelled to Lebanon earlier this year and expressed solidarity with the group which waged war against Israel in 2006. He was also accused of having contact with al-Qaeda. But Mr Finkelstein rejected the accusations, saying he had come to visit an old friend.
"I am confident that I have nothing to hide," he told an Israeli newspaper. "Apart from my political views, and the supporting scholarship, there isn't much more to say for myself: alas, no suicide missions or secret rendezvous with terrorist organisations. I've always supported a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. I'm not an enemy of Israel."
Mr Finkelstein is one of several scholars rejected by Israel in the increasingly embittered divide in academic circles, between those who support and those who criticise its treatment of Palestinians.
Last year, Israel's most contentious "new historian", Ilan Pappe, left his job as senior lecturer at the University of Haifa after he endorsed the international academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Mr Finkelstein was also refused tenure last year at Chicago's DePaul University for attacking several Israel supporters and academics such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deportation of Mr Finkelstein was an assault on free speech.
- (Guardian service)