Dear Secretary Blinken,
Israel’s Coordinating Office for Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) published a 97- page mandate called “Procedure for Entry and Residence for Foreigners in Judea and Samaria Area,” in February 2022.
The new policy complicates, formalizes, and aggravates many of the existing restrictions in place on the entry and residency of foreign nationals in the OPT’s West Bank. It will continue to restrict entry and residency in the OPT for foreign nationals that are spouses, parents, relatives, or children of Palestinian West Bank ID holders, and will force many families to move or stay abroad to maintain their family unity (“silent transfer”). Furthermore, it will arbitrarily control the opportunities for local institutions in several sectors, including the higher education sector, to seek and hire the staff they need based on their own assessments, and will isolate the OPt’s West Bank through its severe limitations on visitors, and other categories of persons, from the rest of the world, including from the Palestinian diaspora.
The new rules represent a clear Israeli intention to restrict, track, and trace the travel of foreign nationals to the occupied Palestinian territories, control Palestinian population growth, and keep data on the land claims of Palestinians holding foreign nationality. They blatantly differentiate between Americans of Palestinian origin, those with roots in the occupied Palestinian territories, and other Americans. In addition, they differentiate between travelers visiting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and those visiting Jewish residents of Israeli settlements there. Most notably, the new rules no longer treat the occupied West Bank as a separate geographic unit from Israel.
According to international law and international resolutions, Israel is not sovereign over the occupied Palestinian territory (the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip), and does not have the right to be in control of the entry and residence of foreign nationals in that territory according to its own sovereign dispensation.
As an occupying power, Israel is required to administer migration into and out of the occupied Palestinian territory in accordance with the relevant obligations and limited sphere of competencies it has under the law of occupation. Under the new COGAT policy, Israeli authorities continue to govern entry and residency in the OPT in a manner that severely, unlawfully (under applicable international law), and arbitrarily restricts the civil and public life of the OPT, and harms the rights of its Palestinian people.
Proponents of Israel’s addition to the Visa Waiver Program cite Israel’s record as a close ally of the United States. However, Israel’s record of human rights abuses, illegal annexation of lands, and the institutionalization of a system of apartheid are all contrary to the most basic of American values, let alone international law.
The United States has consistently provided unlimited and unconditional political, economic, and military support to Israel, in violation of international law, international humanitarian law, and the laws of the United States. No country, let alone a beneficiary of American taxpayer dollars, should get a free pass for discriminating against American citizens based on their origins and political views. This, alone, MUST immediately and unequivocally disqualify Israel from being admitted to the US Visa Waiver program.
Israeli visitors to the United States are not restricted to certain ports of entry depending on their familial relationships within the United States or US-administered territories or based on the ethnoreligious identity of the persons they intend to visit.
Likewise, restrictions on the entry of American individuals, students, and teachers should not be based on whether they have relatives that are Palestinian West Bank ID holders or the institution they seek to study or teach at is Palestinian or Israeli. Reciprocity requires that American citizens be treated with equal dignity just as Israeli nationals are when they visit the United States or territories under US control.
We, the undersigned, call on you to demand Israel end the disparate treatment of American citizens as a non-negotiable condition in the bilateral relations between the two countries and refrain from admitting Israel into the Visa Waiver Program.
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