The summary of this Ynet article captures beautifully the ironic richness of Donna Shalala’s experience getting the Arab treatment at Israel’s David Ben Gurion airport:

Prof. Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of health, arrives in Israel in order to fight academic boycott against Israel, claims she was held at Ben-Gurion Airport just because she has [an] Arab last name.

As the president of the University of Miami, Shalala was “part of an official delegation of the heads of universities fighting against the academic boycott against the Jewish State.” The American Jewish Congress is trying to increase programs and projects between Israeli and American universities in an effort to counter South Africa Apartheid-style sanctions, which really started on campuses in the U.S. context.

Here is Donna Shalala, a prominent Arab-American politician and Democrat, trying to show her professionally-mandated loyalty to Israel. And why? To undermine a movement calling for an academic boycott of Israel on the basis of its apartheid policies and repression of Palestinian academics.

It feels like poetic justice.

If Shalala thinks her 2.5 hour interrogation is bad, it compares little to Israel’s denial of travel, curfews and closings, attacks on schools (in Gaza and the West Bank since 2000), and roadblocks that so frequently keep Palestinian students and teachers from schools. Palestinian professors frequently abandon conference travel plans just out of the chance Israel will deny them the freedom of movement in and out of their own homeland.

Shalala, who is considered pro-Israel, got a small taste of the precise sort of infringements the movement she seeks to undercut is taking aim at. If this does not change her position, she needs to visit the Palestinian territories to see how humiliating and truly oppressive Israel’s clearly racist policies are. Then, she will see why the apartheid analogy, and the subsequently appropriate treatment, are so fitting.

If her experience was even half as degrading as the standard rigmarole reserved for Arabs daring to travel to and from the holy land, she would have a very strong personal basis for joining the international boycott against Israel. Shalala will likely instead take it as a personal affront, which can be remedied by personal apologies and other ego-stroking measures that only wronged VIPs get. She will fail to see her experiences as a microscopic version of Israel’s systematic, racialized policies of differential treatment.

[tarboush tip: @MaxBlumenthal]

Related posts:

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2. Snoop Cancels Show in Israel
3. A Cultural Boycott of Israel
4. South African Union Head: “Israel is an apartheid state”
5. AP Forgets Key Quotes on the UK Union Boycott