Strip-searched in Palestine
(Condensed from a “Counterpunch” article…)
If you visit Palestine, and the Israelis don’t like you, you may be strip-searched at the airport, or elsewhere. Strip searches are meant to humiliate you so deeply that you will never return. They vary in their intrusiveness, and are applied randomly, from the elderly to small children.
Sometimes women are taken into a room and left sitting naked for hours. Other times they are strip-searched in groups, their clothes thrown in a pile. When people are finally allowed to get dressed, they must rummage through a heap of clothing, naked and barefoot.
Strip searches can be applied to Gentiles of any age and citizenship, including American. Even a Jew can be strip-searched if he or she participates in a peace demonstration. Jewish children, however, are never strip-searched.
Sometimes parents and children are strip-searched together. Women are required to remove sanitary napkins with their children at their sides. Other times they are pulled apart and examined separately. All victims report deep feelings of humiliation.
Gaza journalist Laila El-Haddad holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She was strip-searched when she was 12-years-old. "I cried and pleaded with my mother, hoping she could convince the Israeli official to let me keep my undershirt on, but parents can’t shield their children.”
Oregon attorney Hala Gores was strip-searched at age 10. Her family, Palestinian Christians, left Nazareth because of Israeli persecution. She has never returned, because she does not want the experience of having no control over what is done to her.
Maysoon Zayid, however, will not let the Israelis stop her. Maysoon (a New Jersey comedienne and an American citizen) was strip-searched at Ben Gurion Airport when she was "seven, eight, nine years old" on family trips from the USA to visit her parents' original home in Palestine. During a visit in July 2006, Airport officials confiscated her sanitary napkin, and would not let her get another. Zayid was forced to sit in her wheelchair and bleed publicly for hours while she waited for her flight. The Israelis also took away her medication (Maysoon has cerebral palsy). "No one spoke up,” she says. “There were several women, including one who pushed my wheelchair, but no one said a word. When I finally got onto the plane, I had blood all over me. The flight attendants looked at me in disgust. I told them what happened, and they gave me some of their own clothing to use. I didn’t have my medication, so I vomited through most of the flight home to the U.S.”
Zayid founded a program in the West Bank for Palestinian youths who are physically disabled from Israeli violence. She was so depressed by her treatment that she vowed never to return. Then she realized, “That’s what they want.” She is already planning to return to her volunteer work in the West Bank.
Hedy Epstein, a Jew from St Louis, was strip-searched because she participated in nonviolent protests in the West Bank. She was 79 years old at the time, and had documents proving she was a holocaust survivor. Nonetheless, she was forced to bend over for an Israeli official to search her internally.
The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel is a signatory, prohibit: "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor."
Article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states: "No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy."
In the US, such policies would violate child abuse statutes. The state of Utah, for example, defines Child Abuse as: "Any form of cruelty to a child's physical, moral or mental well-being." The Encarta Encyclopedia defines child abuse as "Intentional acts that result in physical or emotional harm to children."
Many people find the experience too humiliating to speak of. One 68-year-old Christian businessman was stripped naked at Ben Gurion airport in 2006 before being allowed to board his flight to return home. He never revealed his experience to his family, and thus could not explain to them why he would never return to his native Palestine.
About fifteen percent of Palestinians were Christian before the Khazars invaded. Now only about two percent of Palestinians are Christian. (All the others left, or were killed.) Since American taxpayers give Israel over $8 million per day, the Council for the National Interest, a Washington DC-based lobbying organization, is organizing a campaign to call on Congress to demand that Israel end these policies.
"We are extremely upset to learn that Israel is using American tax money in ways that degrade and humiliate women and children," says CNI President Eugene Bird. "We call on all Americans to help us on this campaign."
Source:
http://www.counterpunch.org/weir03152007.html
