Israel deporteert studente uit West-Bank

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Israel gaat nu ook al studenten vanuit de West-Bank deporteren?

Groet / Cees
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091113/FOREIGN/711129848/0/MOTORINGUS ‘very concerned’ about Palestinian student deportation
Vita Bekker, Foreign Correspondent

Berlanty Azzam had hoped to get a degree, and then a job in the UAE.
Tara Todras-Whitehill / AP Photo

TEL AVIV // Two weeks ago, Berlanty Azzam was blindfolded, handcuffed
and driven from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip by Israeli soldiers who
claimed the Palestinian university student was illegally residing in the
occupied territory.

Ms Azzam’s expulsion and rough treatment by the Israeli military have
drawn wide international media attention and have threatened to deepen a
rift between the country and its US ally, the Jersusalem consul general
for which was quoted in Israeli newspapers as saying he was “very
concerned” by the incident.

Human rights activists say that the 22-year old senior at Bethlehem
University has become a test case for the risk that some 25,000
Palestinians who live, work or study in the West Bank face in their
possible removal from the area by Israel.


Yesterday, Israel’s Supreme Court held the first hearing on a petition
filed by the Israeli human rights group Gisha on behalf of Ms Azzam,
whom the army refused to grant permission to attend the session.

According to Gisha, the court criticised the military for expelling Ms
Azzam without allowing her to meet with Gisha’s attorney, as it had
promised the group it would do, and ordered the army to conduct another
hearing in her presence next week.


Sari Bashi, head of Gisha, which advocates Palestinian freedom of
movement, said Ms Azzam’s banishment was part of a growing Israeli
campaign to expel Gazans from the West Bank. She added: “We know that
Israel has territorial claims on the West Bank, and it is implementing
policies that induce or force Palestinians to leave the West Bank for
Gaza.”

Ms Bashi said that Gisha and other rights groups have received dozens of
phone calls in recent weeks from Palestinians who have been deported or
are in danger of such a move, which she said indicates that Israel is
stepping up its policies.



Israeli officials, meanwhile, have denied that any such campaign exists.
However, some say that Israel has been concerned that Hamas, the
Islamist group that rules Gaza and which Israel considers a terrorist
organisation, may use access to the West Bank to place its activists in
the Israeli-occupied territory’s universities.

Israel, which controls all but one of Gaza’s border crossings, has
imposed extremely tight restrictions on Palestinians leaving Gaza ever
since Hamas violently took control of the enclave from the secular and
more moderate Fatah movement in 2007.


According to Gisha, the thousands of potential deportees are considered
illegal residents of the West Bank by Israel, which routinely rejects
their requests for permission to register as residing in the area even
though some of them have not lived in Gaza for decades. Israel also
implements a blanket prohibition on Gazans like Ms Azzam from studying
in the West Bank and has not loosened its ban despite a 2007 Israeli
court order for the military to consider making some exceptions.


Ms Azzam, who is a practising Christian, said she had sought to study in
the West Bank because she worried of encountering discrimination in the
universities in Gaza, which she claimed were heavily influenced by
Hamas’s Islamist agenda. So in 2005, after her request for a permit to
study in the West Bank was denied three times by Israel, she headed to
Bethlehem using a five-day travel permit she had managed to obtain in
order to participate in a religious conference in the town, and has
remained there, saying it was her only way to attend the school.


Ms Azzam said that in the past four years, she lived in fear that
Israeli soldiers would stop her to ask for identification documents
during her frequent trips to visit friends in the West Bank city of
Ramallah, about an hour’s drive from Bethlehem.

On the afternoon of October 28, her fear was realised. On her way back
from Ramallah, where she had gone to be interviewed for a possible
part-time job as a saleswoman, she was ordered to get out of a taxi at
an army checkpoint after soldiers spotted a Gaza home address on her ID.
Following a six-hour wait, she was put, handcuffed and blindfolded, into
a military jeep and shortly afterwards dumped at Israel’s border
crossing with Gaza in an experience she later described as “frightening
and dehumanising”.


Speaking by telephone from her parents’ home in Gaza City, she recalled
her fear and added: “It was very scary – I felt like a criminal.”

At the time of her expulsion from the West Bank, Ms Azzam was just two
months shy of earning her degree in business administration, which she
had hoped would help her get a job in the United Arab Emirates, where
her two brothers live.

While Ms Azzam’s professors have tried helping her keep up with homework
by e-mailing her assignments in the past two weeks, she is worried that
may not be enough to conclude her studies.


She said: “The four years will go to waste if I don’t complete this
degree. This was my key to start a business career, and in one instant
it could be gone.”

vbekker at thenational.ae

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