Deportation of AJPP members and others - report, June 2005

Israel continues its policy of refusing access to the occupied Palestinian Territories. Michael Shaik, from Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine, was refused entry and deported in July 2003, many others from numerous countries have been refused entry, including UN officials, and just weeks ago I was subjected to the same treatment.

I first visited Palestine in May 2002 as one of a delegation of five unionists from the ACTU Aid Agency, APHEDA. At the time, the Israeli government had just launched major attacks on the Palestinian cities of Jenin Ramallah, Nablus and Gaza, destroying roads, electricity and water infrastructure, as well as the Palestinian departments of education, agriculture and statistics, and keeping the population of the West Bank under strict curfew for weeks at a time.

Returning in early 2003, I worked for around 3 weeks with the International Solidarity Movement group in Nablus. The ISM is a non-violent, loose organisation of people coming from countries all over the world to show their solidarity with Palestinians and their opposition to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The nightmare has continued since before 1948 and was extended in the 1967 war with Jordan, Eqypt and Syria (whose territory of the Golan Heights has also been under Israeli military occupation since that time).

I, along with people of all ages from the Solidarity Movement, stood as witnesses at the military checkpoints surrounding Nablus, stood or walked with the children to school, slept in houses scheduled for demolition and delivered medicines to Palestinians families imprisoned in their houses when they were taken over by the Israeli army as their base. Just by our presence there, we hoped to reduce the violence against Palestinians and to help them go about their daily lives with some semblance of normality – an impossibility really, under the occupation.

For my visit this time, I had organised to do some voluntary work with the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem, an organisation I had visited before and which focused on environmental research, including into water issues and settlement expansion.

But arriving at the airport in Tel Aviv on 28 May, as soon as my passport details were entered, I was detained and taken off to a ‘holding area’ with other people, mainly from Arabic background.

An interrogator who introduced himself as Boris said he knew that I had organised protests outside the Israeli embassy in Canberra, but what he was really interested in was what I was doing last time I was there. He wanted names of ISM people I had worked with, either Palestinian or international. When I explained that I couldn’t remember names and was there to work with the Research Institute, he said that was ‘just a cover story’. I was transferred to a detention prison at the airport.

I spoke to an Australian embassy person and they apparently asked the Israeli government to reconsider their refusal to let me enter, but with no success. I asked the embassy person whether he had visited the Palestinian Territories and he said no, he hadn’t. I suggested that he go and see what was happening there to the Palestinians. I was deported back to Vienna 24 hours after my arrival.

Obviously Israel has spies in Australia gathering information about opponents to the occupation here and equally obviously, the ISM is having an effect when the Israeli state is so concerned to keep them out. Australians, including the government, should be concerned about the activities of Israeli spies here, particularly given their recent activities in New Zealand, gaining false passports. Is that happening here also?
The whole incident is very telling. The Israeli state is extremely weak if it cannot stand the scrutiny of outsiders who support non-violent resolution to the conflict - in my case a 57 year old woman who has broken no laws, either in Australia or elsewhere. Many others, including UN officials, have been similarly refused entry.

The reason for their desperate action is obvious. The Israeli government is continuing the slow genocide of the Palestinian people as a people, through their deliberate destruction of the Palestinian economy, infrastructure and the take over of their land through building of the monstrous wall and the expansion of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank. The Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas of their land, with no freedom of movement and no means of supporting themselves. In Gaza, they are in a giant prison, even if the Israeli colonies there are dismantled. The Israelis want as few witnesses as possible to their actions there.

This intolerable situation for the Palestinians is never ending, while the charade of a peace process is paraded in the mainstream media, and any Palestinian resistance is given as the justification for even stronger oppression and reprisals. Palestinians continue to be arrested or killed and deprived of their livelihoods.

When will the international community, including the Australian government, say “enough” to Israel and put sufficiently strong sanctions on it to force an end to this 57 year–long occupation and give all Palestinians their human and democratic rights?
Then there will be a real chance of Israelis and Palestinians living together in peace.

- Kathryn Kelly