Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007, pages 25-26

Special Report

U.S. Tour Succeeds Despite Every Israeli Hurdle

By Delinda C. Hanley

ACCORDING TO ARTICLE 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Israel prevents Palestinians from exercising this basic right and, by turning a blind eye to its abuses, the United States is a partner in crime.

Most Americans think that Israel ended its 38-year occupation of the Gaza Strip along the border with Egypt on Sept. 12, 2005. We believe it because we all saw the headlines after the well-publicized departure of Israeli settlers: “Last Israeli Soldier Leaves Gaza Strip.” Israeli settlers and soldiers bulldozed everything they’d built on Palestinian land over the years—except the  greenhouses, purchased by donors for Palestinians to run. But Israel shut off water to those greenhouses, killed the plants, prevented new plants from entering Gaza, then refused to allow Palestinians to export fresh produce, until it rotted on trucks at the borders—but I digress.

Israel has never given up control over Gaza’s air and sea space and, most crippling, all its borders. No one enters or leaves occupied Palestine unless Israel permits them to. Washington Report readers and writers know Gaza is the world’s largest prison. But it is still shocking to bang into its walls.

Soon after the Israelis left Gaza, photojournalist Michael Keating and I tried to travel there from the West Bank. While Israel wouldn’t allow American tourists in, I naïvely believed that, as journalists, we would be able to enter. After filling out application forms, promising to submit photos and articles to Israeli censors, and paying a fee, we waited—calling every day—to check on the travel permit. We still haven’t got one. That was my first hard knock into Israel’s iron wall around Gaza.

After that it should have come as no surprise that Israel makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians living in the prison that is Gaza to take even a brief furlough. What did shock me to the core is that Israel can prevent the U.S. Embassy from giving Palestinians living in Gaza a U.S. visa.

The Washington Report believed it was vital to introduce Americans, especially college students, to our young Gaza correspondent, Mohammed Omer. We know that if more Americans hear and see what daily life is really like for Palestinians—something they won’t learn from this country’s mainstream media—they will demand a change in U.S. foreign policy and peace and justice in the Middle East will follow. Our communications director, Matt Horton, spent weeks arranging Omer’s first 15-city U.S. speaking tour.

For months we waited patiently for Israel to issue a temporary travel permit for Omer to travel from Gaza to Jerusalem to attend his required visa interview at the U.S. Consulate. He needed a face-to-face interview to complete his visa application. As the date for his tour approached—as well as the New America Media award ceremony, on Nov. 14 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, where Omer anticipated receiving the Youth Voice award—we began to panic.

We started phoning and faxing the U.S. Embassy in Israel and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, as well as U.S. congressmen and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Omer’s American friends and readers joined in the effort to pressure Israel to issue the travel permit. U.S. Ambassador Richard H. Jones and his staff in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem tried their best to help. That’s when I realized that even the United States, Israel’s biggest booster, is powerless to help Gazans leave their isolated prison.

Finally, after discussions with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the U.S. Embassy dispatched an officer to escort Omer to Jerusalem and then on to Amman to catch his flight. By coincidence, the Rafah border also opened briefly, and Omer dashed to Cairo for a visa interview there. He had already missed the award ceremony—he arrived in Cairo on Nov. 14—but he was on his way.

As expected, Americans across the country were shocked by Omer’s words and powerpoint presentation. It’s one thing to read about life under occupation, but to meet and hear from someone who lives it every day and see his photos is a shock. His Nov. 28 presentation at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC was covered by C-SPAN. There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience as he talked about the demolition of his home and losing everything but the clothes on his back and his backpack. He told the audience how his mother was injured jumping out a window to escape the bulldozer ramming through their front door.

After the Palestine Center event, our staff jumped into a taxi to return to the office and began talking about Mohammed. The taxi driver (from Afghanistan) turned around and told us he had had to pull off to the side of the road earlier to listen to Mohammed on C-SPAN radio. He didn’t care if he lost customers.

C-SPAN replayed Omer’s talk at least four times, but aside from some brave local newspaper articles and radio and TV interviews, the mainstream press did not report on his visit. Few journalists wandered into his well-publicized press conference at the National Press Club. (A DVD recording of which will soon be available from the AET Book Club.) Nonetheless, Omer’s tour built bridges across the United States, and Americans are clamoring for another visit.

Israel has a mystifying rule that Palestinian must exit and return using the same border crossing. Therefore, Omer had to return via Rafah—which, again, was closed. Omer waited for two weeks in the Cairotel Hotel, in a room kindly donated by the family of our new advertising director, Nadya Saber.

Once again telephone calls, e-mails and faxes flew from both the Washington Report and a Jewish American subscriber to (and from) the U.S. Embassy, Congress, and the IDF in hopes of convincing Israel to permit Omer to return to his home via Jordan. Just when the U.S. Embassy had agreed to escort Omer through the Allenby Bridge border in Jordan and across the West Bank, and as its staff ironed out yet more red tape required by Israel, rumors miraculously circulated that the Rafah border would reopen for a few hours to allow Palestinians to return home to celebrate the Eid.

I wrote to my weary contact at the U.S. Embassy: “As the daughter of a foreign service officer (our executive editor, Richard Curtiss), who was stationed in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Ankara and elsewhere, and the sister-in-law of another, I know the pressures that you and the staff at our embassy face every day. In the old days I believed the good guys (i.e., us) always prevailed in the end. Despite all your hard work, and our Israeli contacts’ promises—then their changes—I have concluded the Israelis will make us all jump through ever-changing hoops and the good guys may well fail. So I just couldn’t caution Mohammed to keep waiting and perhaps lose his best chance to get home.” See Omer’s story of his harrowing return beginning on p. 20.

Israel made it nearly impossible for our reporter to leave Gaza for his U.S. trip and to return home. It nearly succeeded in stifling a Palestinian voice for peace. Why Israel ignores international laws ensuring Palestinians’ right to travel is no mystery. Israel seeks to isolate, demoralize, starve and radicalize Palestinians. But I am deeply saddened, and also baffled, by the way the “world’s only superpower” jumps through every Israeli hoop and silently puts up with its flagrant human rights abuses. And American taxpayers pay the bill.

Delinda C. Hanley is the Washington Report’s news editor.

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