RAMALLAH, September 17, 2016 (WAFA) – The Israeli airport authority denied entry to a United Kingdom visiting professor who was scheduled to give three lectures at the West Bank-based Birzeit University beginning Saturday, a university statement said on Friday.
Professor Adam Hanieh, a senior lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, was deported back to London on the morning of September 13 after he was held for questioning for 10 hours at Tel Aviv airport and then taken overnight to a detention center outside the airport, said the statement.
Hanieh was also banned from entering the country for 10 years.
Birzeit, the main Palestinian university in the West Bank located near Ramallah, invited Hanieh “to share his vast knowledge of global and Middle East political economy with students in the Ph.D. program as well as the university community in a series of lectures scheduled in the coming two weeks,” said the statement.
It condemned the Israeli measure describing it as a systematic Israeli policy and an attack on Palestinian academic freedom.
“This act of denial of entry and deportation by the Israeli state and its agencies is part of a systematic policy of denial of entry to international academics, professionals and activists intending to visit Palestine. This policy represents an attack on Palestinian academic freedom, and is routinely practiced at the two entry points, the airport in Tel Aviv and the Jordan Valley crossing from Jordan,” it said.
“Birzeit University is not surprised by this latest instance of the policy, and hereby draws attention to its destructive effects,” said the statement. “Birzeit University, determined to be part of the international academy, has been once again denied the opportunity to engage with an international academic who would have enriched its academic programs.”
Hanieh, who was at Birzeit in the early 1990s, is the author of Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Haymarket Books, 2013) and Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), as well as numerous academic articles.
M.A.
