In this piece in the Guardian Richard Silverstein comes to a conclusion I agree with; the Gaza Fulbright scholars should be allowed to study in the USA. However, he says some rather peculiar things along the way.

After exerting pressure on the Israelis, four of the scholarship recipients were permitted by Israel to leave Gaza. Israel continued to refuse permission to the remaining three on unspecified security grounds. Gulfnews speculates that the reason may be that the three are teaching assistants at a school closely associated with Hamas. Knowing the flimsy pretexts the Shin Bet uses to tar Palestinians as terror sympathisers, this speculation is entirely credible.

Of course, not all of Hamas’s activities are related to terrorism. They have schools and clinics and much else besides. And, of course, given the current state of things in Gaza, the fact that someone works at an institution controlled by Hamas doesn’t prove that they are sympathetic to terrorism. It is not, however, beyond all the bounds of sense and reason to think that they might be. Hamas’s position on what needs to be done with Jews and what ought to become of Israel is too well known to need repeating here, so the idea that someone working for a Hamas institution might indeed support terrorism against Israelis can’t be thrown out of court with a snort of morally-superior derision as Silverstein does here.

What is the value of a declaration by the Israeli Shin Bet that a Palestinian is a security risk?

It’s hard to say. It could be a lot, a little or somewhere in between. The Shin Bet does a large part of its work in secret and is not greatly inclined to explain its reasons to the press, just like MI5 in Britain, the SIDE in Argentina and the BfV in Germany. Given the success it has achieved in reducing the level of mass-casualty terrorism in Israel it would seem prudent to at least consider the possibility that, in this case, the Shin Bet might have good reasons for its suspicions about the students.

Look at the unproven charges used to smear Azmi Bishara and the daft reasons used to ban Norman Finkelstein from Israel.

The reason that the allegations made against Bishara are unproven is that he high tailed it out of the country before they could be brought to trial. As regards Finkelstein, what on earth could have possessed those Israeli immigration officials when they decided to deny him entry? Could it possibly have been his loudly proclaimed support for Hezbollah and the present regime of Iran? It wouldn’t be hard to think of a large number of other possible reasons too.

As it happens, I think it was a mistake to deny entry to the wretched Finkelstein but the point I want to focus on here is a separate one. It is Silverstein’s refusal to admit that Israel might have reasons for its actions. No one expects him to agree with those actions if he doesn’t find them to be justified, nor to find the reasons to be sound if he believes them to be otherwise, but just to recognise that the reasons exist and might be worthy of consideration. He’s not the only one given to doing this these days.