By Rosie Topham
Britain's Cambridge University has taken the decision not to allow Arabic students to spend their year abroad in Palestine.
The reason is not concern over violent clashes in the West Bank, nor the ever looming threat of war between Israel and Hamas.
Rather, a statement from the Middle Eastern studies department indicated that the decision was “due to recent difficulties faced by students in securing visa renewals from the Israeli authorities.”
London’s Evening Standard reported that five Cambridge students had faced interrogation and, in at least two cases deportation, after landing at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport in the last academic year.
As an Arabic graduate from Cambridge, I remember the terror of arriving at Tel Aviv’s airport for my year abroad, one of the two ways to access the West Bank.
I had been warned to expect cross-questioning, and my heart pounded as the unsmiling airport employee demanded details of my plans, his eyes widening and hand reaching for the phone as I admited my intention to study Arabic.
Students hoping to learn Arabic in Palestinian institutions in the West Bank are required to enter through its occupier, Israel
But why is it such a struggle for visitors from a prestigious university to be allowed access to study one of Israel’s official languages?
The horror of Israel’s visa system is well-documented for individuals of Palestinian or other Arab origin, or those who are coming to study or do humanitarian work in the West Bank.
Faced with long delays, humiliating strip searches, cross-examination and forced to give up internet passwords, travelers from those categories also face arbitrary refusal of entry.
At least 115 British visitors were turned away last year, due to what human rights lawyer Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man described as rules applied “in a discriminatory way”, the Independent reported.
Privileged by my position as a white British woman with an English-sounding name, I was allowed to pass relatively unscathed on my first visit.
Fellow students who were coming to attend a colloquial Arabic course at Bethlehem University with me were not so lucky
A young Czech-Palestinian man recounted the harshness of the Israeli officer who humiliated him during hours of expletive-filled questioning. Another girl, a mild-spoken Belgian convert to Islam, was subjected to a traumatic and invasive body search that left her in tears.
The following year, when I entered via one of the border crossings with Jordan, I faced greater difficulties. My Irish middle name happened to be similar to an Arab name.
Singled out for a brief period as a suspected Arab, I was given a taste of the harshness of Israel’s racist admission system.
Ethnic profiling forms an official part of Israeli visa checks, supported by the nation’s high court which rejected a 2015 appeal.
“As long as the High Court of Justice does not make it decisively clear that discrimination on an ethnic basis is improper, Arab citizens will continue to fear the humiliation every time they come to any airport,” Auni Banna of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel told Haaretz following the ruling.
In the end, Cambridge asked me to leave Palestine and suggested that my peers and I spend my year abroad in neighboring Jordan instead.
That call was made over fears of West Bank violence in response to Israel’s 2014 bombing campaign of Gaza. The British foreign office had advised against all travel to most Palestinian towns over the Eid period and, more than anything, Cambridge wanted to cover its back.
The latest ban is different, however. Not a reflection of U.K. government instructions, the usual criteria for the Middle Eastern studies department, but rather of Israel’s tightened and discriminatory border security restrictions.
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The decision reveals the impact of Israel’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian visitors. It shows that Israeli attempts to strangle Palestine’s academic, cultural and intellectual life are having a real effect.
Last year, for instance, a senior lecturer from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies was turned away and given a 10-year ban in what the university called “an arbitrary breach of academic freedom”.
Israel refuses to issue student visas for West Bank universities, make it necessary to leave every three months to renew tourist passes.
One PhD student from the U.S. told me he planned to remain within Bethlehem for four years on an expired tourist visa to finish his thesis, after Israel threatened to deport him. When he appealed to the U.S. embassy for support, he says, they made clear there was nothing they could do.
That a generation of foreign students will be deprived the opportunity to study Palestinian language and society, as well as witness the occupation first hand is a great shame.
But it is a reality created entirely deliberately by Israeli policies intended to isolate Palestine from its supporters.
