The Israeli government has blocked MIT professor Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank. Chomsky, who is Jewish, was scheduled to speak in the West Bank at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Chomsky was denied entry after being questioned for three hours. Chomsky has been a longtime critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. On Sunday, Noam Chomsky spoke to Al Jazeera about why he had been refused entry.

Noam Chomsky: “There were two basic points. One was that the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the category of, I suppose, every other government in the world. The second was that they seemed upset about the fact that I was just going to — I was taking an invitation from Bir Zeit, and I had no plans to go on to speak in Israeli universities, as I have done many times in the past.”