Israel rigorously controls the identities of the four million Palestinians living under its control in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The occupying authorities have ingeniously engendered statelessness for an entire population.
Since it occupied the OPT in 1967 – and regardless of the Oslo process – Israel has reserved exclusive power of civil registration and issuing of IDs for Palestinians. It unilaterally administers entry visas and work permits for the tens of thousands of Palestinian non-ID holders in the OPT and for foreign visitors. Israel controls all access to and from the OPT, to and from enclaves/cantons it has established within it and – despite ‘disengagement’ – has total control over all human and vehicular traffic into and out of the Gaza Strip.
In September 1967 Israel conducted a snap census in the territories it had just occupied. Anyone not registered had their residency rights revoked. Tens of thousands of Palestinians who were studying, working or travelling abroad immediately lost any entitlement to residency and today have no official identity. Some of this group arbitrarily dispossessed of any nationality later applied to return through a ‘family reunification’ programme. Some were granted the right to live in the OPT as temporary visitors or tourists but even this right has been difficult to obtain or to sustain.
Prior to the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the Israeli government – through the military occupation bureaucracy euphemistically known as the Civil Administration – issued identity cards to the residents of territory occupied in 1967. Those living in the West Bank had orange cards, those in the Gaza Strip had maroon ones and East Jerusalemites carried blue cards which indicate Israeli residency but not citizenship. It made no difference whether they had lived for generations in Palestine, whether they were refugees, ‘official’ returnees (who accompanied officials of the Palestinian Authority back from exile following the 1993 Oslo Accords) or IDPs. Such terms are essentially meaningless within an Israeli-dominated administrative landscape in which Palestinians are either legitimate or illegitimate residents whose status can be altered at whim.......
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