Fateful Triangle

Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds249particularly for the students who are constantly subjected to harassment,including arbitrary search and arrest, imprisonment, beating, andsometimes even severe physical abuse.” The worst has been since thetakeover of the “civil administration” by Professor Menachem Milson,the “Mideast maverick” praised here for his advocacy of a Palestinianrole in the affairs of the West Bank (see chapter 3, section 2.3.2).Abboushi says that “perhaps over one-third of our student body hadbeen in Israeli jails,” where they were “routinely beaten.” Like much ofthe faculty and administration, most of the so-called “foreign students”at al-Najah were in fact Palestinian Arabs who had lost their right ofresidence because they were out of the area when the 1967 census wastaken. The situation worsened after the invasion of Lebanon, whenIsraeli soldiers “attacked the university using real bullets” to disperse ademonstration protesting the invasion. 132In his article “A threat to freedom” (note 127), David Richardsonobserves that just as the Israeli academic community has by and largeshowed “indifference” to the treatment of their Arab colleagues underthe military occupation, so Israeli journalists have for the most partremained (purposefully) “ignorant of the fact that three West Bankeditors have been confined to their places of residence for almost twoyears and thereby prevented from pursuing their professions properly.”Boaz Evron investigated this matter, visiting the three editors in violationof his resolve not to enter the occupied territories. The three editors wereconfined to their West Bank villages three years ago, he reports. Noreason was given. None of them had ever been accused of any crime,and the security services refused to provide their lawyers with anycharges. As editors, they are responsible for what appears in theirjournals, published in Jerusalem, but they are unable to see thesejournals, since distribution is forbidden in the West Bank areas wherethey are confined: “the Kingdom of the Absurd.” “If this were happeningClassics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky