🤥 Movement of Palestinians must be restricted everywhere for security purposes.

According to Israeli human rights organization B’tselem and Amnesty International, Palestinians must contend with over 175 permanent military checkpoints and roadblocks, scores of temporary irregular barriers, and a draconian permit regime supported by a repressive biometric surveillance system. Such restrictions of movement fragment Palestinian communities, disrupt everyday life and amount to unlawful collective punishment. With such measures, no one is safe.

Israel’s full control over Palestinian’s freedom of movement is a tool for occupation, collective punishment and dominance. Palestinian movement is restricted by Israel’s 708 km separation wall (fragmenting Palestinian villages from each other), its discriminatory permit system that determines who can go where, and its policy of checkpoints and closures to make life as humiliating and unproductive as possible. In reality, this translates into tens of thousands of Palestinians regularly being prevented from reaching their workplace and their schools, visiting family members, seeking medical treatment or practicing their right of worship.

The Israeli military regime implemented a policy that restricts foreign passport holders from living with their Palestinian spouses in the West Bank by limiting their visas to a maximum of six months. Couples must apply for permanent residency status in the West Bank, which is subject to Israeli approval. Israel’s restriction on movement isn’t about safety. This is about demographic control by an occupying power seeking to maintain an ethno-state by hook or by crook.

Israel’s apartheid policies, ongoing Palestinian statelessness, and widespread anti-Palestinian/Arab/Muslim sentiments severely curtail Palestinian mobility. These factors hinder Palestinian movement within their own homeland (between Gaza and the West Bank and within the West Bank) and internationally. These limitations on Palestinian human rights and freedom of movement are precisely what fuel resistance and conflict, which are then used to justify further restrictions on Palestinian mobility.

Upon ascending to power in the 1930s, the Nazis passed The Nuremberg Laws and a host of “Aryanization” policies that deliberately sought to exclude Jews and their descendants from public life due to their perceived “threat”. Never again should mean never again for anyone.