How easy is it to get to Gaza?

Felice Gelman

How easy is it to get to Gaza? It’s hard to understand the meaning of “blockade” unless you have actually experienced it. As Americans, we got just a taste of what is served up every day to Palestinians. When you get to the Rafah border, you will inevitably find a crowd of people who have been unable to cross – sometimes for weeks.

Our own delegation’s effort to get to Gaza required contacts and meetings with the UN, Egypt, and parts of the US government. We began with an invitation from UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), which provides services to the 1 million Gazans who are refugees. Such an invitation, even from the UN, is insufficient. So we trudged off to Washington, DC to meet with Egypt’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States, and to ask his help. He wished us well. Then we swung by a few Congressional offices to ask our elected representatives to provide us with a letter of support for our trip to Gaza. I will leave it to your imagination as to how helpful they were! That was followed by negotiations with the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department. They said Egypt (and, curiously, Israel) require us to sign an affidavit waiving our consular rights in Gaza. This can only be done at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, in person, for a mere $30 per. “Why?” we asked. “Because the State Department does not want to make it easy for you to go to Gaza,” was the reply.

In Cairo, we learned that the bus company we had booked with had been visited by the police and told they were not allowed to take anyone to the border.

Alarm bells! Surprisingly, we found a little help at the US embassy, from a well connected diplomat who agreed to check out our problem and to inform the Egyptian police that the U.S. embassy had no opposition to our trip. He called back to say the problem was the Egyptian secret police.

The ever resourceful CODEPINK did what the US embassy would not --- tracked down the Egyptian Foreign Ministry liaison with the secret police and sent him the names of all 130 people to be cleared to go through the border. A sigh of relief…. But, when we arrived in Al Arish, right behind us three big tour buses pulled in carrying the first two CODEPINK groups returning from a day of protest at the border! They had not been allowed to cross.

In the middle of that night, the real fun began. Around two a.m., I was "invited" to come downstairs to meet the Egyptian secret police. Thereon followed a Kafkaesque conversation indeed. Three unnamed Egyptians, who claimed they were police, said we had no clearance to cross the border. They were extraordinarily reluctant to identify themselves. One told me it was forbidden for him to identify himself because he was the secret police! The gumshoes invented one story after another about why we could not cross to Gaza – our embassy, the Foreign Ministry, the national intelligence service, etc. But their bottom line: don’t go to the border and don’t stage a protest.

We decided it was all a bad dream, loaded up the buses and headed for the border. Outside Arish, we came to a checkpoint where three truckloads of riot police waited, along with an assortment of other uniformed types. The road to the border was closed for “military exercises”. Once we turned back, all the uniforms packed up and left. I guess the “military exercise” was “how to close a border.”

After our CODEPINK friends back in Cairo made yet another visit to the Foreign Ministry, we were told we were cleared for the border. Back down into the buses. Our 2 a.m. secret police pals showed up to wave goodbye, all smiles and giggles.

It was hard to believe there wouldn’t be another snag along the way. When we got to the Egyptian border’s gate, there was one. The police asked for the nationalities of all the people in the groups. When they learned we had one Palestinian with us, they said, “Let us see the passport.” It was Aysha Al Ghoul’s, whose papers were “not in order.” Aysha had been studying in Tunisia, came to Cairo to go home at last year’s end, was not able to go home because of Israel’s attack on Gaza, and lost her passport. The Palestinian Authority issued her a new one but it did not include the Egyptian visa stamp that had been lost with her old passport. Several visits to the Egyptian authorities did not produce a new visa stamp. Because she is Palestinian, it is always a problem. (The Border Police paid absolutely no attention to the expired Egyptian visa of an American). Sadly, Aysha went back to Cairo while we went on to Gaza – her home country that she is not allowed to enter.

That is how Americans go to Gaza. Palestinians, Egyptians, and many others don't get to laugh off the secret police, and work the bureaucracy until it caves in. They usually just don't get to go to Gaza at all.