Noam Chomsky barred from West Bank: a chronology of coverage
On Sunday, Noam Chomsky, the Jewish-American linguist and controversial political essayist, was temporarily barred from entering the West Bank from Jordan via the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge crossing. He had intended to deliver a series of lectures in Ramallah as well as visit a site associated with protest against Israel's security barrier. Soon after Chomsky was turned away, Sabine Haddad, a spokesperson for the Israeli interior ministry renounced the action, attributing it to a bureaucratic 'misunderstanding.' Below is a timeline of UK news coverage of the story.
Sunday, May 16:
The Guardian stated that Chomsky, 'whose withering critiques of political establishments have earned him the wrath of regimes of all persuasions around the world,' was scheduled to lecture 'on domestic and foreign policy at Birzeit University and the Institute for Palestine Studies.'
That same day, Chomsky told the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera that the border official made clear to him that, 'the government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world'. Chomsky rejected the Israeli government's apology, stating 'There was no misunderstanding. I was invited to give a series of lectures. It was straightforward, I do it all the time.'
In its coverage of the affair, the BBC News Online described Chomsky as 'renowned for his work on linguistics and philosophy' and added that he had planned to tour the West Bank with independent Palestinian MP Mustafa al-Barghouti.
According to Chomsky, he was stopped by 'very polite' border officials who purportedly stated that 'they did not like that [he] was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too.' In an interview with Reuters, Al-Barghouti labelled the action as 'fascist... amounting to suppression of freedom of expression.'
Monday, May 17:
Donald MacIntyre, the Jerusalem correspondent for The Independent, called Chomsky a 'giant of 20th-century linguistic philosophy as well as a prominent critic of US and Western foreign policy over decades'. And liberal daily Haaretz published an article about the barring and quoted Chomsky as saying that his treatment was reminiscent of his experiences in the Soviet era: 'I find it hard to think of a similar case, in which entry to a person is denied because he is not lecturing in Tel Aviv. Perhaps only in Stalinist regimes.'
Tuesday, May 18:
The Telegraph cited an Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev, who spoke originally to The New York Times, denying that Chomsky was on any official blacklist: 'The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.'
The Times ran its own interview with Chomsky in which he asserted then analogized Israel to apartheid South Africa: 'Israel […] has visibly got much more paranoid […] In fact, it is rather reminiscent of South Africa in the early 1960s, when it began to be recognized that they were becoming a pariah state.'
The article also revealed that Chomsky was scheduled to meet the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad.
The Times was the only British newspaper to also note that the Israeli public reacted critically to the border guard's decision to turn Chomsky away. Yaakov Turkel, a former Supreme Court judge told the newspaper: 'I would not prevent the man from entering, unless I had information that his statements would pose a danger. Every person has a right; it is his right to enter and his right to leave Israel.'