New Israeli rules curb travel from West Bank

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent


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.

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http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090816/FOREIGN/708159831/1135

Not helpful to a two-state solution.

Oppose.

This is exactly why my family left in 1997.

Surely there's no way anyone could try and excuse this sort of thing?

Nothing much new here.