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Blocage de Noam Chomsky ( voir notre article du 17 courant à ce sujet)

Gush Shalom réagit et dénonce les abus anti-démocratiques des autorités israéliennes.

Mercredi, 19 mai 2010 - 17h30

Wednesday 19 May 2010

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After Chomsky affair, Gush Shalom considers high court appeal
Published today (updated) 19/05/2010 12:31

Bethlehem - Ma’an - Following the Israeli Interior Ministry’s decision to bar prominent US academic Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank, Israel peace group Gush Shalom is considering filing a Supreme Court appeal against the ministry.

A Tuesday statement from the peace group said it was calling for clear and transparent criteria for denying entry to travels and their arguments."Such decisions cannot be left to anonymous officials and security operatives, who become a thought police and censor political opinions"

On behalf of Gush Shalom lawyer Gabi Laski wrote to Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai, demanding that he issue regulations with clear criteria on who is to be denied entry into Israel and why, the statement read, following Chomsky’s bar on entry to give a lecture at the Palestinian Birzeit University in Ramallah.

“There were also many other recent cases of foreign citizens denied entry, such as Spanish clown Ivan Prado. In none of these cases was an explanation or reason offered, beyond unspecified ’security reasons’,” the statement read, referring to the clown who was deemed a security threat by Israel as he landed in Ben Gurion en route to Ramallah for a clown festival.

“There are ample grounds for suspicion that the real reason was the political views and activities of those denied entry – which is not a legitimate argument for the government of a country which boasts of being ’the only democracy in the Middle East.;”

The Gush Shalom statement said the ongoing trend of unreasonably and unjustifiably preventing the entry of many people into Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories “creates the impression that anyone who criticizes Israel has a reason to worry of being denied entry. This causes great damage to democratic discourse and to freedom of movement, with Interior Ministry officials becoming a kind of ’Thought Police’ (and incidentally severely damaging the State of Israel’s international standing).”

“Such acts also clearly manifest the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, which goes on unabated even in times of negotiations and ’proximity talks’. The State of Israel arrogates to itself the right to determine who would and who would not visit the Palestinians – in Chomsky’s case, who would be allowed to lecture at a Palestinian university and who would not,” Gush Shalom wrote.

In the letter Lasky writes that according to Article 14 of the Entry into Israel Law, from which the Minister of the Interior derives the authority to “remove” people who arrive at the country’s borders, also obliges the minister to make regulations specifying what categories of people would be forbidden an entry visa or a residence permit . “However, the current minister, like his predecessors, avoided making such regulations, leaving the issue to the arbitrary decisions of unnamed officials at the Interior Ministry itself, working with operatives of the Shabak Security Service, who hold secret deliberations and reach secret decisions, without publishing the decision itself or its reasons.”

Regulations must clearly be set out and published, defining the criteria by which someone would be denied entry, pointing out that many do not know of the risks when they arrive and are never explained the reasons why they were deemed a security threat. “Supreme Court rulings clearly [state] that the making of this kind of regulation is not left to the minister’s discretion, but is an absolute obligation.”

“Absent a satisfactory answer from the minister, Gush Shalom will consider petitioning the Supreme Court.”