Harvard students held inside a bus in Al-Walaja (Photo:Anne Paq/Activestills via 972)
Haaretz reports:
Israel Border Police expelled a group of 55 students from Harvard University from a Palestinian village after a confrontation erupted along the separation fence near Jerusalem.
The marvel of this story is that 55 Harvard students are visiting the occupation, traveling along the forbidding separation wall south of Jerusalem.
And the Israeli hubris. It’s not a good idea to alienate establishment American institutions. Israel detains students in a trip organized by Harvard’s Kennedy School when they try and visit the occupied village of al-Walaja, which is seeing its land devoured by the Gilo settlement, a Jewish colony. Apartheid before your eyes. From Tuesday’s Crimson, David Song and Amy Q. Friedman:
Israeli border security personnel placed 55 Harvard students in police custody Tuesday during a trip to al-Walaja, a Palestinian town in the West Bank, which was organized by students at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Shireen Al-Araj, the students’ guide and a coordinator of al-Walaja’s local Popular Committee Against the Wall, was arrested by police and released after the incident, according to a trip participant, an organizer, and a photographer who witnessed the arrest.
No charges were levied against anyone involved in the Harvard trip.
The students’ bus was boarded by armed Israeli military personnel and the riders were told that the road they were traveling on was a military zone, according to one of the trip’s organizers.
The organizer, a Palestinian teaching fellow at Harvard, is not traveling on the trip and asked to remain anonymous to avoid trouble with authorities when he returns home to Palestine.
He said that the IDs of the Palestinians on the bus, including the bus driver and a Harvard tour organizer, were confiscated by the police.
Israel has continuously “tested” international power to condemn it. Bad behavior has thus become a norm, a habit, a strongly-reinforced-behavioral-system, and what might appear to be hubris is no longer an act of defiance but, rather, an act of ho-hum daily procedure.
The key to all this is that NO-ONE has fought back except — perhaps — Turkey w.r.t. the boats.
Perhaps Harvard or part of it will “speak up”. But don’t hold your breath, because the strongly-reinforced-behavioral-system of NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT ISRAEL is now part of American SOP.
Maybe this incident will be part of “breaking the silence” and, we hope, “breaking the inaction.”
Israel has taught the Harvard students the kind of lesson that can’t come from a book: what the Palestinians are up against. What Israeli “democracy” looks like from the perspective of its victims.
Many of the Harvard students will likely end up in positions of leadership in US society during the coming decades. I hope other student delegations follow.
The Dersh is probably working hard to get them tossed out of school. Cant wait to hear what Petey Beinart has to say, wait, yes I can……………
Dan, I don’t think your guy Dersh is worried about this here! He is busy tearing a new orifice for those Uppitty Goys over at CAP (already done – forced to hire a pro-colonial PR Firm) and plotting on Media Matters (M J Rosenberg you are a marked man). These 55 whippersnappers will be handled by less venamous critters like Pam Geller.
i searched unsuccessfully over @- activestills.org for photos of the incident.