Recently, this fear has been confirmed; countless families in which one or more members hold a foreign passport have found themselves fractured by the denial of entry of one of their members. Many of these are middle class families headed by diaspora Palestinians who returned to help develop their country during the post-Oslo years. As a Palestinian official who holds a European passport pointed out to me, "this is particularly symbolic since, by choosing to return to Palestine, these people represented the optimism of the Oslo years and personified the state-building project." If this trend continues, a whole segment of the Palestinian middle class may be dispersed, taking with them their business investments and entrepreneurship, leaving the Palestinian economy that much more unstable.
On top of this, there are the countless numbers of Palestinians who at one point left (or were forced out from) their country and are not allowed to re-enter with the passport of their adopted country. This was the case with a colleague's European passport-holding brother, who was denied entry to the West Bank via Allenby Bridge around the same time as myself. And while he was taking me to the American embassy in Amman where I would pick up my new US passport, a taxi driver from the West Bank city of Nablus recounted how he left to work in Jordan some years ago, leaving behind his wife so she would not be separated from her family. Having lived outside the West Bank for too long, the Israeli authorities did not let him return, and so he and his wife continue to live apart.
Holding his West Bank ID up for inspection, a Palestinian man attempts to pass Al-Ram checkpoint to Jerusalem shortly before the Friday noon-time call to prayer during the holy month of Ramadan (Maureen Clare Murphy)
Access is restricted even internally within the West Bank, making it difficult or impossible for many individuals from Jenin or Nablus to travel to Ramallah or Hebron and vice versa. The Israeli military controls all Palestinian movement with its hundreds of forms of movement restrictions in the West Bank and its restrictive permit system. Most Palestinians holding a green or orange West Bank or Gaza ID have not been able to access East Jerusalem, considered part of the West Bank under
international law, in over ten years as they are not allowed to do so without a rarely issued Israeli permit. And these days, not even members of the Palestinian government (save President Mahmoud Abbas) are able to travel from the West Bank to Gaza, and vice versa.
Palestinians are left unable to reach places of worship, education and health services, and even family members - breaking social, economic, and cultural structures. Israel imposes such policies for "security" reasons, but the terms that more accurately reflect reality are collective punishment and oppression. These movement restrictions are becoming increasingly formalized by million dollar checkpoints-cum-terminals, suggesting that the intention is actually to strengthen Israel's grip on the occupied territories and establish "facts on the ground" to preempt a negotiated resolution to the conflict.
When Israel began building its new "Atarot Crossing" terminal between Ramallah and Jerusalem where the former Qalandiya checkpoint lay, rumors began to fly that the thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites holding Israeli permanent residency cards would have to obtain permits to cross to Ramallah and the northern West Bank. Since the new terminal has been in use, this hasn't been the case (though since the beginning of this month, they not able to pass through a similar terminal at the entrance to Bethlehem), but many believe that there is no telling when such a policy could be put into place. The permanency of the technologically sophisticated structure gives weight to such speculation. Why would so much money be invested in a temporary security measure? The same question must asked of Israel's barrier in the West Bank, the current route of which effectively annexes ten percent of the West Bank to Israel, and isolates Palestinian communities from one another.
Replacing the eminently more temporary-looking former Qalandiya checkpoint, the new "Atarot" crossing terminal is complete with LCD monitors misspelling greetings in English (Maureen Clare Murphy)
Dangerous silence
Earlier this year, then-Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz of the new scope of impunity that Israel enjoys following last year's unilateral disengagement from Gaza. Regarding the state's illegal assassination operations in Gaza, he bragged, "there is not a single word of criticism anywhere in the world. And do you know why? Because the disengagement gave us degrees of freedom in carrying out everyday security activities, which we never had before ... The day before yesterday we carried out a targeted interception [sic] in Gaza. The day before that we did another targeted interception [sic]. Not a critical remark, not a hint of critical remark, has come from anywhere in the world.'"
The international community's silence has been deafening as Israel routinely drops missiles onto Gaza -- one of the most densely populated areas of the world -- in its illegal extrajudicial assassinations, and is currently embarking on its indefinite deployment there. Of course, the civilian casualty count has been predictably high. When asked to, Israel justifies such operations as necessary to deter the launching of crude, homemade Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. But such measures are not in compliance with the legal principle of proportionality, and the daily shelling of the Gaza Strip amounts to another form of collective punishment of the Palestinian civilian population. Meanwhile, Olmert has been meeting with world leaders to secure international support of his "convergence plan," the latest Israeli euphemism for unilaterally determining final-status negotiations issues. But the foundation of these unilateral plans has already been laid. With much of the Wall and the new permanent checkpoints in place or under construction, the architecture for new, Israeli-determined borders is already there.
The numbers speak for themselves: Israel's disproportionate response to Qassam rockets amounts to collective punishment
Though not accepting the scheme hook, line and sinker, the international community is greeting this latest unilateral plan as the "only one in town," despite past affirmations that a bilateral negotiated resolution to the conflict is the only way to move forward. With the international community's boycott of the democratically elected Palestinian government, half of them currently in Israeli detention, the Palestinians are as powerless to claim their rights as ever. Worsening the situation, now that it is becoming increasingly difficult for international observers to access the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian civil society institutions will be losing invaluable conduits of advocacy to the outside world. The international community will become all the more blind and deaf to human rights abuses and rights violations committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. While Olmert will continue to enjoy the warm company of fellow statesmen, Palestinian civilians will become increasingly isolated under Israeli occupation.
What will be the effect on Palestinian society if internationals working in Palestinian civil society are not allowed to conduct their work, and Palestinians who returned to develop their country are forced to leave? With Palestinian voices largely absent from mainstream corporate media coverage of the conflict, who will be there to communicate the everyday devastation of Israeli occupation and unilateralism to the rest of the world? With a toothless international community, including consulates in Jerusalem who privilege Israel's policies over the rights and interests of their own citizens that they are meant to protect, the outlook is indeed grim.
When I sought advice from the US Embassy in Jordan after being turned away at Allenby bridge, I was told that while Israel has the right to control its borders, at a certain point the turning away of American citizens (while Israeli citizens are not kept from entering the US) becomes "a bilateral issue." Despite this, after I was deported from the airport, the response from the US consulate in Jerusalem was that tighter restrictions on foreigners entering the West Bank was understandable given the growing tensions between Hamas and Fatah. Other Americans who have contacted the consulate have been told a similar story. However, one has a hard time believing that any sweeping policy denying international passport-holders entry is actually in the interest of safety, rather than to remove some of the most credible and able -- as far as international news audiences are concerned -- persons likely to witnesses and protest Israel's designs on the West Bank.
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BY TOPIC: Banning of internationals and foreign passport-holding Palestinians
Arts, Music & Culture Editor of The Electronic Intifada, Maureen Clare Murphy had spent the last year and a half living in the West Bank city of Ramallah and working for the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq before being deported late May