Letter to Blinken & Mayorkas
On Thursday, June 22nd, FOSNA’s Executive Director Jonathan Kuttab delivered this letter to Secretary Blinken and Secretary Mayorkas detailing how including Israel in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program while discriminating against Palestinian Americans through a COGAT permit system would blatantly codify apartheid.
The Honorable Antony Blinken
Secretary of the Department of State
Washington DC, 20520
The Honorable Alejandro Mayorkas
Secretary of Homeland Security
Washington DC 20528
My name is Jonathan Kuttab. I am a US citizen. I am an attorney, a member of the New York Bar Association for 45 years, and a member of the Bar associations in Israel and Palestine, with a law office in East Jerusalem. I am well acquainted with the laws, regulations and practice regarding access of US citizens to Israel and the Occupied Territories. I am also familiar with the working of COGAT, an arm of the Military Government, and how it operates and impacts the lives of Palestinians needing a permit that can only be obtained through them.
It has come to my attention that Israel is proposing, and the US government is considering, a process by which Palestinian American citizens seeking to travel to Israel and the Occupied territories will be “facilitated” through a permit system operated by COGAT. This was reported in the Times of Israel. This is being suggested as a concession to obtain Israel’s acceptance into the US visa waiver program, as opposed to meeting the requirement of reciprocity and ending discrimination against American citizens who are of Arab or Palestinian ancestry.
It is my belief that such a permit regime would be utterly disastrous for Palestinian Americans and would provide legitimacy to a system of arbitrary and systematic discrimination against such American citizens. COGAT is a well known agency of the Israeli military government, and it administers a variety of permits for West Bank and Gaza residents, and is well known and detested by Palestinians as part of a matrix of control over their lives.
Judging by my own knowledge and experience with the operations of COGAT, such a permit regime would be unacceptable for the following reasons:
The permit system is largely discretionary, thereby granting wide powers to those administering it to grant or deny permits, or hold them up for lengthy periods of time arbitrarily, or to use that power to harass, or exact demanded behavior, or even to blackmail those requesting permits into becoming collaborators.
The system is not transparent, and the decision-making mechanisms is not subject to clear criteria which are known and can be examined.
Permit denials are not subject to the same appeals procedures as visa denial decisions made at Israel’s airport in Tel Aviv. There is no requirement that there be a hearing and due process.
There is no judicial control over the administration of the system, and even though, in theory , the system is subject to judicial oversight, as an administrative decision, in reality such oversight is never practiced. The authorities, when challenged before Israeli courts invariably rely on “secret evidence” which the courts routinely and invariably accept.
Such has been our experience with the permit system currently in use, and we have many documented cases of Palestinians being denied permits by COGAT even for humanitarian reasons, such as seeking a permit to travel for cancer treatment.
In addition to all this, such a discriminatory procedure contradicts the other side of reciprocity, since Israeli citizens are not required to go through a special permit regime once they enter the United States, nor are they restricted in any way regarding their travel within the US
The US position should be a straightforward insistence on nondiscriminatory treatment (“blue is blue”) for all its citizens rather than the creation of a separate permit regime that by itself discriminates against Arab and Palestinian Americans, and which is within the power and the discretion of Israel to manage in lighter or harsher degrees as it chooses.