Higher Education, visas, and dispossession
Israel has issued a harsh new set of restrictions regarding who will be allowed to teach in Palestinian institutions of higher education. Lecturers must have “unique expertise in their field” as determined by none other than the Israeli military authorities. If approved, they will not be able to teach for a cumulative period longer than five years. These regulations constitute a serious attack on academic freedom. Institutions of higher education are a backbone of society especially for a people in struggle. Israeli authorities have also put additional requirements on other travel to the occupied Palestinian territories. The regulations require that visitors provide names and identification numbers for everyone they plan to visit, set strict procedures and time limits for the visas of students and volunteers, demand for some high deposits for security of NIS 70,000 (approx. US$20,000), and further limit visa possibilities for foreign spouses of Palestinians.
These regulations are rights violations on several levels, but what I wish to emphasize here is that these Israeli limitations on mobility—like others—are also restrictions on Palestinian collectivities. Many of the faculty who have typically sought positions in Palestinian universities are Palestinians in diaspora or the spouses of Palestinians with local status. Thus the new regulations impact Palestinians disproportionately. They would require that travelers on tourist visas disclose family relations and land ownership or expected inheritance. Moreover, if one is the spouse of a Palestinian, one cannot apply for student, lecturer, foreign expert, or volunteer visas, effectively making it impossible for spouses to work, study, or volunteer. For these spouses, achieving permanent residency to live and work in the occupied territories without a visa is extremely difficult.
The regulations as initially issued in the spring of 2022 had been placed on pause for the summer in the face of opposition coming from multiple academic institutions and members of the US Congress. A dozen Congresspeople sent a letter to the Biden administration elucidating the problems created by the academic visa restrictions and asking the administration to state its position on the policy. While some of the strangest rules were removed—like the requirement to declare a romantic relationship to military authorities within three months of its commencement—the core of the regulations remain. The most recent version has been analyzed by HaMoked (see also this podcast and report in Mondoweiss).
Israeli exclusions limit connections among Palestinian families and curtail exploration of personal histories. These restrictions could prevent Palestinian students from learning from Palestinian professors whose parents might have left a generation or two ago.
These 2022 regulations build on existing restrictions, both formal and informal. Foreign faculty in Palestinian colleges and universities have long faced insecurity of access and arbitrary restrictions on visas. Generations of Palestinians (and others seen to be aligned with them) know of the tension of passport control, have sat in the small rooms where one might be pulled aside for interrogation. They know the dread of being banned from entry for ten years. Since 2017, Israel has prohibited the entry of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) supporters into Israel, the global corollary of Israel’s anti-boycott law, which subjects Israeli citizens to sanction if they support boycott. The initial denial of entry to US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in 2019 is just one of the most prominent examples of Israel’s politicization of its visa policy.
When I spoke about some of this to a colleague, they suggested that regulating entrance was part of the normal business of a state. Why, they suggested, should Israel allow entry for those who support a BDS movement that, in their view, poses a threat to Israel? One can certainly debate whether a nonviolent BDS movement poses such a threat, or whether it seeks to push Israel to adopt more just policies that might ensure a safer and more stable future for all.
But more to the point, Israel has maintained itself as a polity based on not only exclusion of outsiders—the normal business of nation-states, which is often violent and hierarchical—but also the dispossession and expulsion of the native population. Indeed, these new restrictions do not apply to those visiting Israel’s 1948 territories, they apply only to those going solely to Palestinian Authority administered areas. The visa exclusions and attempts to control Palestinian higher education are, of course, the tip of the iceberg. Much more massive is Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right to return.
Israeli exclusions limit connections among Palestinian families and curtail exploration of personal histories. These restrictions could prevent Palestinian students from learning from Palestinian professors whose parents might have left a generation or two ago. They could prevent a Palestinian from Detroit from learning next to a Palestinian from Deheisheh refugee camp.
These policies are a minor addition to a huge set of existing Israeli policies that limit Palestinian mobility and prevent Palestinian co-presence: Closure policies and siege make it nearly impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to visit, study, work, or marry in the West Bank. Closure prevents Palestinians in the West Bank from entering Israel, where about one fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian. “Family unification” laws make it impossible for Palestinian citizens of Israel to marry Palestinians in the occupied territories and begin a life with them in a location of their choosing. Israel often denies entry permits to Palestinians living in Jordan to visit the occupied territories, even when they have family in the West Bank. In more subtle ways, Israel’s walls and infrastructural policies—as well as its highly militarized checkpoints inside the West Bank as recently featured in the film The Present—inhibit connection among Palestinian cities and villages within the West Bank. The Israeli government claims that these are measures taken on behalf of Israel’s security, hardly questioned inside Israel or internationally in the long shadow of the “War on Terror.” But what they fundamentally do—in addition to racializing Palestinians and diminishing their life options—is make it impossible for Palestinians to be together in so many different ways.
Nurturing of Palestinian collectivities poses a threat to a state that has been premised upon Palestinian exclusion and erasure, as we have seen throughout Israel’s history, from the mass displacement of the Nakba through the Nation-State Law of 2018, which codified Jewish supremacy. In the digital age, Palestinian collectivities can certainly live online; Palestinians can manifest collectivity as they read each other’s novels and poetry, listen to each other’s music, and watch each other’s films. But let’s face it: co-presence helps too.
Collectivities are made and remade in practice, as I discuss in my book, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression ». When Palestinians gather each year to commemorate the Nakba, they are practicing mini returns that point to the larger right and future of return. Yet, they must do so in so many different places, in part because of Israeli closure policies. There is the March of Return held each year in a village depopulated by Israel within its 1948 borders (last year in Mi’ar), and there is a more official commemoration in Ramallah in the West Bank. There are dozens of other events in towns, cities, and refugee camps across the occupied territories, in Israel’s 1948 territories, and in the diaspora, where people fly kites or write the names of their lost villages or confront the Israeli army (or PA security forces).
Collectivities emerge all year long. Palestinians try out different ways of asserting collectivity in protests. Small and fleeting gatherings take shape in shared taxis and buses as passengers and drivers negotiate soldiers’ orders at a checkpoint. Or when a group of people dances dabka together, or looks at art together, or mourns a martyr together.
Keeping Palestinians out of Palestine precludes cousins from dancing at each other’s weddings, prevents the sounds of the ‘ayins and Has from taking root in the throats of Arabic learners at Birzeit University, prohibits a thousand glasses of homemade lemonade on a thousand different patios and verandas. This, of course, is what Israel wishes: to limit Palestinian collectivity itself. So much is going wrong in Palestinian politics—corruption, complicity with Israel’s rule, authoritarianism, exclusion of the most vulnerable Palestinians, especially refugees, from plans for the future—that Palestinians need to rethink how they can build power for the people, how they can reimagine their futures together. This can start with gatherings, in the plural, with discussions in classrooms and beyond.
Visa restrictions on students, professors, and other visitors violate rights and have profound political effects. In the face of these regulations, we must continue to stand for the right to education and against discriminatory practices. And we must continue to celebrate those collectivities that persevere.
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