Beirut: Gulf News accompanied Noam Chomsky, famed Jewish-American political commentator and world-renowned linguist, on an accompanied tour of South Lebanon on Friday. During the tour, Chomsky met with Hezbollah official Nabeel Kaouk.
Chomsky recently made headlines after Israel refused him entry to speak at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank last week.
"They didn't like that I wasn't going to speak at any Israeli university. I've lectured before in the Palestinian territories many times, but this time they didn't want to hear a critical point," he explained to Gulf News.
Regardless of Israeli efforts to bar him from entry, the lecture was delivered via a satellite link from Amman. Chomsky will be speaking in Beirut on Tuesday coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the liberation of the South from Israel.
Second visit
At 81 years of age, this was his second visit to Lebanon in four years. Chomsky visited several villages in the south that were devastated after Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006. Among the locations he visited were Bint Jbeil, Maroun Al Ras, Fatima's Gate, the Khiam Prison, Kfarkila, Nabatiyeh and Mleeta.
He inquired about the conditions of the people, reconstruction projects and the presence of Unifil forces.
Kaouk explained that Israel's military manoeuvres on its northern borders that began on Sunday coincided with south Lebanon municipal elections."It's an intimidation and we are prepared for all the possibilities," he said.
The exercises would span the course of five days featuring a series of alerts as part of field training exercises in different areas as well as a 90-second siren throughout the country on Wednesday. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the drill was an annual event aimed at learning lessons from the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
"We have no intention of starting a war in the north," Barak told reporters ahead of a weekly cabinet meeting, echoing earlier statements by senior officials insisting that the drill was not related to any specific threat. His remarks came after Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri said the exercises "ran counter to peace efforts" and the Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon mobilised thousands of fighters in response to the drill.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called in Damascus and Beirut yesterday for an easing of tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours, urging all sides to respect a 2006 ceasefire in Lebanon.
"We cannot be resigned to a constant state of tension, even if it is decreasing," Kouchner told journalists after a meeting in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
In Damascus, Kouchner expressed France's concern over Hezbollah's weaponry, to which Al Assad gave assurances it was not in the interests of Damascus, Tehran or Hezbollah to trigger a new conflict, a French diplomatic source said.
The source said that France as a peace broker also wanted to encourage Syria to ease tensions in the region. After Damascus, the foreign minister travelled on to Beirut from where he was to head for Egypt to wind up his regional tour in Cairo.
— With inputs from AFP
