Break up of families: a case study in creeping transfer

Abstract

In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the enforced separation of families is a social problem greater in scope than unemployment or illiteracy in many other societies. While Israel orchestrated a massive campaign to foster Soviet Jewish emigration and unite the Jewish people in the former homes of Palestinian refugees, the systematic separation of Palestinian families passed without comment. Thousands of Palestinian families were torn apart by the expulsions of 1948, and additional thousands rent asunder by the forced exodus which accompanied the 1967 war. In subsequent years, Israel's deportation policy, applied with equal ferocity to political dissidents and unregistered residents, ensured that more Palestinian families were routinely separated without prior notice. Where those attempting to rejoin their loved ones were once shot on sight by border patrols, currently applications for family reunifica tion on humanitarian grounds are systematically refused on the grounds that they are not 'extraordinarily humanitarian'. Jackson Diehl's Washington Post article in late 1989 was perhaps the first attempt in the US mainstream media to examine the subject with the attention it deserves; his predecessor, Glenn Frankel, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Occupied Territories without once seriously addressing the subject, despite the fact that hardly a family in the West Bank or Gaza Strip remains unaffected. Khaled al-Batrawi, his wife Reema and their 1-year old daughter Beisan certainly don't look like a separated family, and the mere reality of them entering the door together seemed to defeat the purpose of this interview. As the conversation progressed, however, it became clear that their situation was not only insufferable, but could have been, and may yet become far worse. I asked Khaled, a 30-year-old resident of al-Bira, located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to relate the problems of a family denied the right of cohabitation not because his was a particularly severe case; as described below, he is more fortunate than most. Rather, his intimate knowledge of the subject, command of detail and the more typical involvement of a spouse as opposed to a sibling, child, or parent shed light on the situation confronting many Palestinian families.