While American neo-cons (many of them Jewish) continue to push for a military strike against Iran and Israeli “democracy” decreases by the day – witness the story of a key Jewish dissident, Yonatan Shapira, being interrogated by Israeli intelligence for daring to support BDS. Hilariously, he’s asked to feel sorry for soldiers maintaining the West Bank occupation – life in Palestine worsens. Where are the Western corporate journalists writing about this?
The woman looked at the young man in front of her as though he were a rare museum exhibit. He’s a native of Gaza who arrived in the West Bank on his own about four years ago, and has lived there since then. He’s not a senior official in Fatah or in one of the Palestinian Authority security services, not a relative or an associate of a highly placed person.
So how did you do it? He smiled and raised his eyebrows. The woman, also a native of Gaza, replied to his amused silence: “Ah, I understand, you had a brain tumor.” Several of the others in the room strangled cries of panic. We had to explain to them that this is only a metaphor for the strange and unusual way he had found to receive a transit permit from Israel for the purpose of entering the West Bank.
The young man did not explain what the “strange way” was. He said that from the age of 12 he knew that he wanted to study and live in the West Bank. Many Gaza residents dream of studying in the West Bank (and not necessarily settling there ), but, as regular readers will recall, the Israeli authorities and the members of the High Court of Justice do not consider studying in general, and higher education in particular, a sufficient reason for issuing the transit permit. Family, work, a livelihood, friends, a desire to travel: these are not sufficient reasons either. Only extreme medical cases or other humanitarian emergencies are officially considered a good enough reason for Israel to allow someone to leave Gaza via Israel.
It should be noted parenthetically to anyone who talks about an almost total removal of the Gaza blockade and insists that the rest depends on Egypt: That is a fiction. Nonsense. Western imagination. Israel is maintaining its consistent policy of not allowing the Palestinians from the Strip to reach the most natural place for them: the West Bank. Israel has achieved an almost total victory in its 20-year-old policy of severing the population of the Strip from the West Bank, to the point that this severance is not considered part of the blockade.