21 NOVEMBER, JERUSALEM:
Rana Khoury, Deputy General Director of the International Center in Bethlehem (ICB), wasn’t expecting a phone call from the United States on Monday night. After four solid days of agonizing phone calls to the Israeli Military Authorities, representatives of the Jordanian government, a handful of airlines, and numerous partners abroad, Rana and the whole staff at the ICB felt quite certain they had finally gotten the ten Palestinian Lutheran high school students and two supervisors safely on their way to their two weeks of study and student fellowship in Guatemala. But at 2am on Tuesday morning, Rana was awakened by the telephone and sent running to her computer for a phone number from the internet. Had she not been able to locate it in five minutes, the students might be back in Bethlehem now, turned back home and denied passage to their destination by U.S. airport security.
The students and supervisors of the ICB-sponsored trip had all arrived in St. Lucas, Guatemala by Tuesday afternoon. But not without a story to tell.
Or, more accurately, a whole series of stories to tell. The ten students from the Dar al-Kalima School in Bethlehem (a school of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan) and the two supervisors from ICB traveled to Guatemala this week under the auspices of Art Resources for Kids (ARK), a program begun by ICB and partners in the U.S. and Guatemala.
“The program is intended to bring together marginalized children from the three places to share and learn from one another’s experiences,” said Dr. Mitri Raheb, General Director of the ICB and Pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. The initial plans for the program, developed in 2001, called for a gathering in Bethlehem last year, one in Guatemala this November, and one in the U.S. in 2004. Last year’s meeting in Bethlehem was canceled due to the political situation; the students are meeting one another for the first time this week.
The events leading up to the group’s final arrival in Guatemala Tuesday afternoon are an illustration of the almost total isolation imposed on Palestinians, even young students from one of the Bethlehem area’s top high schools, living in the West Bank today. They are also an illustration of the tremendous resources and resolve required of Palestinians to overcome the obstacles before them in almost every aspect of daily living.
Last July, personnel from the ICB and the Dar al-Kalima School began working to obtain the necessary permission to fly the students and supervisors out of Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv and arrange for their stay in Guatemala this November. Confirmation of permission to fly through Tel Aviv didn’t arrive, but since an application for special educational permission had been filed early, the group was led to believe their request would be granted; tickets were purchased for a Friday morning flight (14 November). The Guatemalan visas arrived Thursday afternoon, but just a few hours later the ICB was told permission to leave from Ben Gurion was denied. ICB was left with no choice but to call Continental Airlines six hours before the flight’s departure and pay the cancellation fee for all twelve seats.
At this point the story splits along lines of distinction intimately familiar to Palestinians today: identification cards. Of the ten students from Bethlehem, two hold Jerusalem identity cards and eight hold cards from the West Bank. The students live and attend school together, but based on where their parents were between the 1948 and 1967 wars, their status and rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories are different. ICB immediately began arranging parallel routes for the students’ passage to Guatemala: the Jerusalemites through Tel Aviv and the West Bankers and supervisors through Amman, Jordan.
First the Jerusalemites. As holders of Jerusalem identity cards, two of the students were allowed access to Ben Gurion International Airport. ICB booked the students on a Monday morning flight, routing them through Spain on their way to Guatemala. The students were taken through the Bethlehem checkpoint into Israel at 3am Monday morning, arriving sleepy-eyed in Tel Aviv at 4. After checking their baggage and waiting an hour and a half in line, the young students reached the counter and were asked for their transit visas for their stay in Spain. Even for the two hours of their scheduled layover, the students were told that as Palestinians they could not travel without having previously applied for and obtained Spanish transit visas (documents not required of Israeli citizens traveling through Spain). Add two more cancellation fees to the bill, and the students were sent back to Bethlehem that morning.
“When they came back that morning,” Dr. Raheb said, “they were not only tired; they were deeply depressed by how they had been treated.” ICB booked the two Jerusalemites on yet a third flight, this one leaving Tuesday morning and stopping only in the U.S. The students arrived in Guatemala late Tuesday afternoon.
Now the West Bankers. Holders of West Bank identity cards are almost never allowed access to Ben Gurion International Airport and can enter Jordan only with special permission. Late Saturday afternoon, ICB succeeded in obtaining permission for the eight students and two supervisors to enter Jordan on Sunday for a Monday morning flight out of Amman. The group left Bethlehem at 4am Sunday morning hoping to avoid delays at the military checkpoint and arrive early at the Jordanian border; instead they spent four hours stopped at the checkpoint and were held at the border until 3pm. When the group finally crossed the Allenby Bridge into Jordan, less than 50km from Bethlehem, they had been traveling for eleven hours.
But the students were in great spirits. For all but two, this was the first time they had left Palestine-Israel. Residents of Bethlehem have not even been allowed access to Jerusalem, just 5km up the road, since 2000. So the visit to Amman was a taste of freedom: even with their long day of travel, the students spent the evening exploring the busy streets of the new city.
Early Monday morning the students and supervisors boarded a plane in Amman. They made their connection flight in Paris without incident and were in Miami, Florida on Monday noon, EST, eager to see the United States for the first time.
The young students and their supervisors were not, however, greeted with a warm welcome. Upon arrival they were separated from all other passengers making connecting flights in Miami, individually fingerprinted, individually photographed, and held in the custody of airport security until their flight for Guatemala was ready to board six hours later.
When the time arrived for boarding the flight to Guatemala, the supervisors were asked to produce contact information for their hosts in the country. They handed over the names and addresses of their contacts in St. Lucas but were told they must also produce a telephone number immediately or they would be sent back to Jordan. After coming this far and beating this many odds, the group’s fate was hanging on a ten-digit string of numbers.
That’s when Sami Abu Ghazalleh, one of the supervisors, made the emergency phone call to Rana Khoury, sending her to her computer in Bethlehem at 2am to search for a contact number in Guatemala. She was able to locate it quickly and relay the number to Sami just minutes before the plane’s scheduled departure.
“Most of these students have never been outside Palestine,” Rana said this Wednesday. “And this is the first impression they receive of the rest of the world—that they are viewed as criminals.”
The students face daily lives of intense discrimination as Palestinians within the Occupied Territories and Israel. Even as top students representing the Palestinian people at a student peace conference, they found no less in their travels abroad this week. As they trudged through bureaucratic procedures and countless security measures on their way to a meeting of marginalized children from around the world, they were met not with warmth or welcome, but with suspicion and harassment at every step of the way. Layla Asfoura, one of the supervisors, expressed the group’s sentiments eloquently this week:
“If God wants to curse someone, he has only to let him be born Palestinian.”
Andy Willis
Assistant to the Director, ELCJ Schools/Educational Programs