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August 17, 2009
JERUSALEM // In an echo of restrictions already firmly in place in Gaza, Israel has begun barring movement between Israel and the West Bank for anyone holding a foreign passport, including humanitarian aid workers and thousands of Palestinian residents.
The new policy is designed to force foreign citizens to choose between visiting Israel, including East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed illegally, and the West Bank. In most cases, travel between the two areas will no longer be possible.
The new regulation is in breach of Israel’s commitments under the Oslo accords to western governments that their citizens would be given continued access to the occupied territories.
Israel, which controls the population register for both Israelis and Palestinians, has not suggested there are any security justifications for the new restriction.
Human rights groups complain that the rule change will further separate East Jerusalem, the planned capital of a Palestinian state, from the West Bank. It is also expected to add to the pressures on families where one member holds a foreign passport to leave the region and disrupt the assistance aid organisations are able to give Palestinians.
According to observers, the regulation was introduced quietly three months ago at the Allenby Bridge terminal on the border with Jordan, the only international crossing point for Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli officials, who control the border, now issue foreign visitors with a visa for "Palestinian Authority territories only", preventing them from entering Israel and East Jerusalem.
Interior ministry officials say a similar policy is being adopted at Ben Gurion, Israel’s international airport near Tel Aviv, to bar holders of foreign passports who arrive via this route from reaching the West Bank.
Gaza has long been off-limits to any Palestinian who is not resident there and has been effectively closed to Israelis and most foreigners since early 2006, when Israel began its blockade.
"This is a deepening and refinement of the policy of separation that began with Israel establishing checkpoints in the West Bank and building the wall," said Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah who heads a Right to Enter campaign highlighting Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement.
"Foreign governments like the US ought to be up in arms because this rule violates their own citizens’ rights under diplomatic agreements. So far they have remained silent."
Mr Bahour, 44, said the immediate victims of the new policy would be thousands of Palestinians from abroad who, like himself, returned to the West Bank during the more optimistic Oslo period.
Well-educated and often with established careers, they have been vital both to the regeneration of the local Palestinian economy by investing in and setting up businesses and to the nurturing of a fledgling civil society by running welfare organisations and teaching at universities.
Although many have married local spouses and raised their children in the West Bank, Israel has usually denied them residency permits, forcing them to renew tourist visas every three months by temporarily leaving the region, often for years on end.
Mr Bahour said the latest rule change should be understood as one measure in a web of Israeli restrictions strangling normal Palestinian life.
In addition to the wall and checkpoints, he said, Israel regularly deported "foreigners", both Palestinians and humanitarian workers, arriving in the region; it denied family unification to prevent Palestinian couples living together; it often revoked the residency of Palestinians who study abroad for extended periods; and it confiscated Jerusalem IDs from Palestinians to push them into the West Bank.
In early 2006 Mr Bahour, who is married with two daughters, was affected by another rule change when Israel refused to renew tourist visas to Palestinians with foreign passports, forcing them to separate from their families in the West Bank.
After an international outcry, Israel revoked the policy but insisted that Palestinians such as Mr Bahour apply for permits from the Israeli military authorities to remain in the West Bank.
"This latest rule, like the earlier one, fits into Israel’s general goal of ethnic cleansing," he said. "Israel makes life ever more difficult to encourage any Palestinians who can, such as those with foreign passports, to leave."
Mr Bahour said the new restrictions would further sever the West Bank from Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian commercial and cultural life.
Overnight, he said, his Ramallah business consultancy had lost a quarter of its clients – all from nearby East Jerusalem – because he was now barred from leaving the West Bank.
He lost his limited privileges last month when he finally received a Palestinian ID. He said he had been forced to take the ID, which supersedes his American passport in the eyes of the Israeli authorities, to avoid the danger of being deported.
"The ID was bittersweet for me. It means I can’t be separated from my family here, but it also means my American passport is not recognised and I am now subject to the closures and arrests faced by ordinary Palestinians."
Sari Bashi, a lawyer with Gisha, an Israeli organisation that challenges restrictions on Palestinian movement, said the new policy was placing a severe obstacle in the way of humanitarian organisations, as well as foreigners working in Palestinian welfare organisations and academic institutions.
"Many of the aid organisations working in the West Bank have offices and staff in East Jerusalem and even in Israel, and it’s difficult to see how they are going to cope with this new restriction."
She said staff of major international organisations such as the United Nations refugee agency, UNRWA, and its humanitarian division, OCHA, had been denied entry at Ben Gurion airport after declaring that they were working in the West Bank.
"When Israel prevents access to an area, it raises the question of what is happening there," she said. "What are we being prevented from seeing?"
Human rights groups are also concerned by the wording of new restriction, confining foreign citizens to "Palestinian Authority territories". The PA rules over only about 40 per cent of the West Bank. The groups fear that in the future Israel may seek to prevent foreigners from moving between the PA-controlled enclaves of the West Bank and the 60 per cent under Israel control.
Guy Imbar, a spokesman for Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, said the phrase referred to the entire West Bank.
But Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions warned: "Given Israel’s track record, it is right to be suspicious that the restriction may be reinterpreted at a later date."
jcook@thenational.ae
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