This is the latest installment in Ethan Heitner’s Freedom Funnies series for Mondoweiss. It is part one of an interview with Palestinian filmmaker and writer Annemarie Jacir. You can see the entire Freedom Funnies series here.
(Click on the first image below to view it larger, and then click in the upper right hand corner to scroll to the next page.)
Really well done, and heart-wrenching. Those borders are what finally drove me out of Palestine. Sheer horror. Truly the banality of evil.
ditto. it’s an awful experience, even for a white American. I sorta want to do Xanax the next time too, my anxiety builds for a day….
i was hanging in the west bank with some palestinian americans from jersey. they always fly through jordan, then cross over into the OPT.
i was shocked that they had to pay a FEE to get into their homeland…. pay a FEE for the humiliation of being checked by israelis, to get into the effing OPT. it pisses them off.
it is absurd.
i also met a palestinian who is married to a canadian, and now has a canadian passport. once he tried to fly into tel aviv on the canadian passport. because he was arab, they checked him out and found out he was *palestinian*…. because he was palestinian they denied him transit, and shipped him back to canada, knowing full well he would simply fly to amman and then enter through there, at great expense. they also marked his canadian passport so he wouldn’t be able to use it on israel again.
also the “wall” is a joke, and he considered sneaking into israel from the west bank and playing pool with me in tel aviv. it is very easy to do, and hundreds do it daily. he got cold feet, and so did i, as i didn’t want him to risk getting caught and getting some jail time and a record/fine.
the absurd insulting realities of israeli apartheid. you need to visit to really take in some of them. look forward to more stories from phil’s trip.
i wanted more..got to the end and thought..no fair! i hope there is an update on the shrunken crew filming guerilla style. great interview. i want to see the film. thanks for this.
I was denied entry in mid-2002 when the Israeli’s first started cracking down on foreign passport holders entry into Palestine. I was relatively lucky to be among those first denied access. The Israelis weren’t yet organized, and using a new second passport I was able to return to Palestine a month and a half later. As a foreigner I was also lucky in that if I hadn’t been able to return I wasn’t losing access to my family and homeland.
Immediately after I was denied entry and while still at the bridge I met a colleague who was being returned to Palestine after being denied entry to Jordan (yes Arab states are complicit in limiting Palestinian travel). We got on the phone with a lawyer at Hamoked, but two very big goons soon came and literally carried me outside to a bus that took me back to Jordan. I was transported out of the country on my own private bus, separated from all of the other people waiting to go to Jordan. Apparently I was such a serious threat that I couldn’t be trusted to travel with others.
The feeling of loss I experienced while waiting for that bus and over the next several days is something that is hard to explain. In a moment my life had been completely upended. My home, my job, my friends, my bank account, etc. were all in Palestine. The material possessions didn’t matter that much, but the thought of severed relationships was hard to deal with. In a moment some of the people who meant the most to me had been ripped from me. Not being able to say goodbye and not knowing if I would ever see friends again was the hardest part of being denied entry.
I recognized even then that my losses were inconsequential when measured against the daily injustices perpetrated against Palestinians by the Israeli occupation. Despite this experience I can’t even begin to understand Annmarie’s loss and the losses of the tens of thousands of other Palestinians who have been denied entry and who have had their families torn apart by racist, discriminatory Israeli policies.
In the years that I have spent in Palestine I have seen an incredible amount of violence. I was in Ramallah during most of the second Intifada including during defensive shield. After Defensive Shield I walked through the ruins of Jenin and was on the first investigate team to enter Nablus (where, although under reported, the level of destruction and number of deaths was higher than in Jenin). I was in Lebanon three weeks after the 2006 war and witnessed the terrible destruction and loss caused by that war. I was in Ramallah during Cast Lead and traveled in and out of Gaza regularly both before and after that massacre. Each of these events was horrific. However, the subtle violence of Israel’s policies of separation which keep Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside ’48 apart, which deny the entry of Palestinians from outside access to their relatives and homeland, which tear apart families, is at least as powerful and perhaps more harmful than these horrific but time limited acts of physical violence.