SAIC Alum Deported

by Russell Gottwaldt

If you’ve ever felt marginalized from the constructs of Israeli-Palestinian debates and wondered why you should even care about the actions of people so far removed from life as an American college student, don’t feel bad. Entire nations are doing the best they can to make you feel this way.

Chicago native, SAIC alum and former F Newsmagazine editor Maureen Murphy was deported from the Israeli airport in Tel Aviv in late May this year. Last month, many sympathetic charity workers were deported under flimsy pretenses. Barely-publicized stories included nine British charity workers, according to The Yorkshire Post and The Journal (Newcastle); a Californian (and member of the International Solidarity Movement), according to The Contra Costa Times; and a Florida professor after the Israeli government failed to convict him of financially aiding terrorists, according to the Associated Press.

In her recent article on Electronic Intifada, “Entry Denied: Deporting witnesses of Israeli occupation and unilateralism,” Murphy intricately describes Israeli-controlled labyrinths of paperwork, limited visas and guarded checkpoints in Palestine. The militaristic mess of passes and papers Israel designed to separate and splinter Palestinian communites are now being used to deport international journalists and activists from the country, effectively preventing first-person news reporting.

Murphy was living in the West Bank city of Ramallah, working for the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq (which attends United Nations meetings as a Palestinian consultant, arguably the most effective of its kind), and writing reviews of Palestinian arts and entertainment when she was deported. Her July 11 article posted on Electronic Intifada describes how she was barred from the West Bank where she lived, and eventually deportated from the Tel Aviv airport.

“Denied a hearing and any further legal recourse,” Murphy wrote, “I was merely given a very unofficial-looking piece of paper from the Israeli authorities as they shoved me on a plane back to Toronto.” The slip of paper stated, contrary to what the guards told her, that Murphy was being deported because of “illegal activity in the ‘territories’. ”

This is becoming an increasingly common experience for Palestinian-Americans, journalists reporting on Israel’s human rights violations and activists helping Palestinians in the West Bank. As long as Israel tries to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the Palestinians, and as long as Israel tries to keep stories of illegal arrests, detainment and murder from reaching the rest of the world, it will be difficult for sympathetic writers and charity workers to stay in the West Bank for long.

fnews
September 2006

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