WADSWORTH - Ghazi Falah sat out the fall semester, depressed and exhausted over being detained in an Israeli prison for three weeks last summer.
Last week, he returned to teaching geography at the University of Akron.
For the first time, he’s fully talking about the allegation he was a spy for the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah and that he trained in Afghanistan or Chechnya for its cause. It is rubbish, he said this week in his comfortable modern home in a Wadsworth subdivision.
“Everyone should know this is not fair,” said Falah, 53. “It is very important. Israel gets money from the United States and they should know what this money is going for.”
As it combats terrorism, Israel is holding about 9,700 prisoners, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Prison Authority told the New York Times last fall. The Times said most of the prisoners were Palestinian.
Falah never thought those numbers would include him, though.
He maintains he was only taking a break from visiting his mother in a hospital, where she was to have surgery for a nonmalignant brain tumor. But driving north to a resort area near Lebanon to sightsee and take photos proved to be a mistake.
He was jailed in a windowless, underground cell and interrogated for up to 60 hours at a stretch about minutiae such as what kind of flag he flies at home (“Brazilian,” he responded in frustration) and the size of a Lebanese friend’s house.
He went on a hunger strike, then realized that it was in his best interest to stay healthy.
He was upset to learn his interrogators told an academic colleague in Europe that he had used his camera to track bombs that fell in Israel and that a Lebanese phone number was stored on his cell phone.
Not true, he insisted, as he was detained four days before hostilities erupted between Israel and Hezbollah in July and he doesn’t own a cell phone.
At the same time, his arrest made headlines internationally. Geographers from around the world rallied to demand his release.
They included Hilal Khashan, a professor of political studies at the American University of Beirut.
“Professor Falah is, unquestionably, an individual of the highest moral caliber,” Khashan wrote online. “The free time he has, while in Lebanon, is consumed entirely by culinary pursuits and futile matchmaking.”
Falah’s family gave interview after interview to get his story out. His son, Naail, gave so many he went hoarse.
They didn’t know much. Falah didn’t talk to his wife, Jamila, 45, or three sons during his imprisonment and only saw his attorney near the end of his stay.
It all came to a close when a judge ordered him to be charged or let go. Four days later, he was gone.
“I’m clean, like a white tooth,” he said he told a jailer.
That has led to fame of a sort.
He was besieged for interviews on both sides of the Atlantic and approached by a Canadian movie company that wanted to do a story on his life. (He said no.)
His family held a celebratory barbecue in the backyard for about 100 supporters.
Then he shut it all down. But he couldn’t let it go.
“I was obsessed,” he said. “I was hurt.”
He took a semester off from UA, where he has tenure.
His wife, Jamila, said he sat for hours looking around their house, drinking it all in. He wrote a 12-page report describing his detainment for his attorney in Canada, where he taught before coming to the United States. He has dual citizenship in Canada and Israel.
While he visited Lebanon in December for a meeting of the Arab World Geographers he organized, he declined a colleague’s suggestion to drive south to the Israeli border.
“I should be more wiser,” he said. “I should stay in Beirut until the conference is over.”
He tried to get Canada to pay for his $30,000 defense in Israel. The government declined.
Now he’s threatening to sue Israel. He wants an apology and compensation for his defense.
He believes he was being penalized for his longstanding academic work on the border dispute between Israel and its neighbors. At an Association of American Geographers conference five years ago, for example, he argued the media was biased against the Palestinian cause.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human-rights organization in Los Angeles, criticized his report as biased and political.
He has sent an open letter to supporters, asking them to write to Israel and possibly to threaten to boycott conferences held in Israel. “Don’t be afraid of any accusation of anti-Semitism,” he wrote. “Intelligent Israelis and Jews everywhere know criticism of Israeli government abuses is not anti-Semitic. Indeed, it is quite the opposite, in solidarity with a longstanding passion for truth and justice in Judaism.”
Carol Biliczky can be reached at 330-996-3729 or cbiliczky@thebeaconjournal.com.
