Omar Barghouti is one of the co-founders of the BDS movement. He has visited the US numerous times and was scheduled to embark on a speaking tour that included events at NYU, Harvard, a black community bookstore in Philly and a synagogue in Chicago.
He had also planned to attend his daughter’s wedding in Houston. Last week, as he was about to board his flight, the US consulate informed his airline that they had revoked his visa. He was pulled from the flight.
Given my regular, unhindered travel to the US for years, this ban seems to be an ideologically and politically motivated measure that fits in with Israel’s escalating repression against human rights defenders. Israel’s far-right regime is not merely continuing its decades-old system of military occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, it is increasingly outsourcing its anti-democratic tactics to the US.
As a co-founder of the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, I have been smeared by the Israeli government and banned from travel repeatedly, including in 2018 when I was prevented from going to Jordan to accompany my late mother during cancer surgery. Israel’s intelligence minister threatened me with “targeted civil elimination”, drawing condemnation from Amnesty International. Their de facto and “arbitrary travel ban” against me was recently lifted for three months after Amnesty International’s pressure. [...]
Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid and the US civil rights movements, BDS calls for cultural, economic and political pressure on Israel to end its military rule over Palestinian and Syrian territories occupied since 1967, grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and recognize the UN-stipulated right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin, a universal right that applies to all refugees. It is supported by the overwhelming majority of Palestinian society.
— www.theguardian.com/...
This is further demonstration of how closely aligned the Trump administration and Republican party are with the Israeli government. The far-right Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu has governed Israel for over 30 of the past 40 years, repeatedly winning election on platforms that trumpet discrimination and oppression of Palestinians.
The Trump administration has another special envoy appointed to the Middle East, who had some ahistorical and ridiculous views.
Trump and the modern Republican party have an ethno-nationalist worldview. They see nations as exclusive homelands for various races/ethnicities/religions. They are fundamentally opposed to integrated societies. In societies with a mix of different ethnicities and religions, they want supremacy for their own ethnicity/religion and political/economic subservience from others. They are explicitly opposed to equal rights. This world-view conforms very well with the views of Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud in Israel. Which is why these two regimes are so tightly allied.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we will see that such supremacist views are widely held in the US. When taken to their logical conclusion as in this reprehensible essay, they result in advocacy for ethnic cleansing.
— @subirgrewal