Summary
Israeli journalist quoted by Makdisi on the new permit regime that bars Jerusalem Palestinians from the West Bank: asking for an entry permit means the Shin Bet will try to enlist collaborators in exchange for it, and refusal for not proving one’s presence is “vital” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.123).
Details
- “Experience shows that ‘asking for an entry permit’ is not as simple as it sounds,” Hass writes, as quoted by Makdisi: asking means waiting days and weeks, wasting days in lines and on the telephone, “and then hearing that you don’t have the right to go to Ramallah because you did not prove that your presence there is vital” (PDF p.123).
- Hass adds, in the same quotation, the humiliation of needing an Israeli permit “to do the most natural things in the world: visiting a sister and friends, going to work or the doctor, buying cheaper produce in the market, finding a book in the bookstore, or hearing poet Mahmoud Darwish give a poetry reading in the theater” (PDF p.123).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Occupation by bureaucracy, Mahmoud Darwish