Israel’s international mobilities regime: visa restrictions for educators and medics in Palestine

ABSTRACT

This article examines Israel’s control of international presence in Palestine as an ‘international mobilities regime’ that has damaging effects for the provision of services in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Focusing specifically on educators and medics, the discussion draws on long-term fieldwork to set international visa restrictions in the context of the ‘internal’ control of Palestinians’ mobilities before documenting the effects for education and healthcare provision. Discussion then turns to the scale and function of bureaucracy that produces a further significant effect: to make nothing happen whereby projects are stalled, cancelled or rendered inconceivable. To this methodologically elusive function, the approach proposed here is to attend to an order of ‘what would have been’ to better understand the power of bureaucracy to prevent movement and make people stay in place. Two main arguments are made: that Israel has developed an international mobilities regime that extends its control over Palestinian spaces; and that the scale of control is perceptible only by careful attention to the lost possibilities effected by bureaucratic restriction – and key contributions are explicated for further enquiry into bureaucracy-as-deterrent, the international dimensions of Israel’s mobility restrictions and a turn to ‘unspectacular’ sites of colonial control.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• Israel
• bureaucracy
• governing
• mobilities

1. INTRODUCTION

Israel controls all border entry points into Palestine and thus determines the legal status of the international citizens who live and work in the Occupied Territories. Many struggle to secure entry and/or long-term visas and must navigate opaque bureaucratic processes for renewal against a constant threat of possible denial and deportation. Some visas for longer term residents are renewed for very short periods (e.g., two weeks) and often impose strict conditions on mobilities (e.g., no travel to Jerusalem) and livelihood (e.g., no remunerated labour) (Griffiths & Joronen, 2019). Other visas are caught in prolonged bureaucratic procedures that delay and stop activities in different sectors, including higher education at Palestinian institutions (Adalah, 2019; Merriman, 2009; Najjar, 2014), healthcare in West Bank and Gaza hospitals (Feder et al., 2019), human rights advocacy (Beaumont, 2017; Human Rights Watch (HRW), 2017) and humanitarian aid in Gaza (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 2018). In many other instances, and as has become apparent during the research presented here, these bureaucratic procedures function as a deterrent such that entry into Palestine is not even attempted for the expectation of visa denial. Visa restrictions thus have significant effects in Palestine. Where internationals are denied/deported or avoid attempting entry, work activities do not take place: technical, educational and intellectual exchanges are lost; journalistic and legal documentation of human rights are impeded; and Palestinian sectors are deprived of engagement with international flows of labour, ideas and capital. In this article we draw focus on two affected areas – education and healthcare – with the objective of examining Israel’s visa bureaucracy as an ‘international mobilities regime’ that has deleterious knock-on effects for the provision of services in the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The enquiry here builds from the base observation that the case at hand brings together bureaucracy, mobility and colonialism in a geographically distinct way. While Israel’s ‘domestic’ control over Palestinian borders and mobilities is the subject of a well-developed body of scholarly work – for example, on closure, checkpoints and daily routines (Griffiths & Repo, 2020; Hammami, 2015; Peteet, 2016, 2017) – whose intersections with bureaucratic practices are similarly well-documented – for example, on permits (Berda, 2017) and travel documents (Tawil-Souri, 2012) – the issue of visa restrictions is distinctive for the fact that internationals¹ are caught within the colonial mobilities bureaucracy that governs the population of Palestine. The particularity of the case bears explication: citizens of the historical metropoles (United States, UK, European Union (EU) states) are subject to contemporary practices of colonial bureaucracy that are marked by the logics of denial and removal. Importantly, the issue is not confined to the settler colonial state’s control of the indigenous Palestinian population (Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury, 2015), as the target subjects sit outside the existing analyses of Israel’s bureaucratic practices in the Occupied Territories (Berda, 2017; Shenhav & Berda, 2009), including those that focus specifically on removal and elimination (Griffiths & Joronen, 2021; Tawil-Souri, 2012). There is not, either, a seamless connection to Israel’s ‘racial exception’ against Palestinians (Lentin, 2018) for the important corrective that while many internationals have Arab/Palestinian heritage, many do not: this subject of governing cannot be coherently categorized as a homogeneous racialized group.² Nor is the case of targeted internationals explainable as a mere extension of the geopolitics of travel documents and the international mobilities they afford (Neumayer, 2006); those affected are, in all cases and in the vast majority of other contexts, the ‘beneficiaries’ of the unevenness of global mobilities (Adey, 2017). Despite this, it is frequent that consular missions are unable or unwilling to protect the rights of their citizens, even where non-intervention contravenes international humanitarian law.³

Israel’s control of Palestine is thus not solely a ‘domestic’ issue where permits and infrastructural segregation delimit movements within colonial spaces; it is maintained (and strengthened) also via an international dimension related to the denial of access to such spaces.⁴ The international extension of colonial control is not, to be clear at the outset, a basis for enquiry into the difficulties faced by ‘expats’ dealing with the occupation.⁵ Rather, the task here is to examine the control that Israel’s international mobilities regime enables by asking three key questions: (1) What is the relationship between Israel’s domestic and international control of mobility in/to Palestine? (2) How do visa restrictions affect education and healthcare in Palestine? (3) What is the scale of control and its effects?

The article’s three main sections are each focused on one of these questions. The first sets visa restrictions in the context of mobility restrictions for Palestinians (e.g., that educators/students and medics/patients are denied travel for study/training/treatment) to show that Israel’s ‘internal’ control of Palestinian movement diminishes capacities in provision that endows visa restrictions with the power to further deplete existing capacities. The second section documents significant effects: education is disrupted because lecturing staff are deported mid-semester; medical training is scaled-back with repercussions for cancer treatment. Visa restrictions, we therefore contend, have become an important mechanism in Israel’s control of Palestinian territory. To capture something of the scale of this control, the third section is conceptually ambitious in an attempt to address the many occasions where, in effect, nothing happens: work activities are stalled or cancelled, and in many cases even the prospect of visa denial deters internationals from attempting entry. We argue that this is the bureaucratic function at the heart of Israel’s international mobility regime – to make nothing happen – and develop a framework that is sensitive to the effect of losing the possibilities of mobilities to an order of ‘what could have been’ (Lowe, 2015, pp. 40–41). We conclude by explicating the two main arguments of the article – that Israel has developed an international mobilities regime that tightens its control over Palestinian spaces; and that the scale of control is perceptible only by careful attention to the lost possibilities effected by bureaucratic restriction – and by setting out the wider contributions of the research for further enquiry into bureaucracy-as-deterrent, the international dimensions of Israel’s mobility restrictions and a turn to ‘unspectacular’ sites of colonial control.

2. ISRAEL’S VISA RESTRICTIONS IN CONTEXT

There are no entry conditions issued by the Palestinian National Authority, only those imposed by the State of Israel that controls all land, sea and air entry points into the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).⁶ The Israeli Ministry of Interior provides for a range of visas for visitors from overseas with purposes inside Israel; the issue is more complicated where activities are intended in areas governed by the Coordination of Israel Government Action in the Territories (COGAT), the part of the Ministry of Defense that administers the West Bank and Gaza. According to the most recent (August 2019) COGAT documentation,⁷ named categories of international arrivals can apply for three-month entry visas – spouses or children under 16 of oPt residents; business people/investors; lecturers and consultants; humanitarian cases and ‘others’ – while two others can request a six-month stay: workers of foreign missions; workers of international organizations. Those from countries with a formal visa agreement with Israel must present documents to a COGAT (i.e., not Ministry of Interior) representative on arrival and – if granted – renewals can be applied for up to a year (but no more than 27 months altogether) via the Israel-controlled Population Registry in Ramallah or the COGAT headquarters in Beit El (an Israeli settlement in the West Bank). Entry is contingent on not having a previous denial of entry and is subject to change based on the political and security situation. On the other hand, for entry to and/or residency in Israel, an ‘Immigration Visa’ provides for ‘the right of every Jew to immigrate to the State of Israel’; an A/1 Temporary Resident Visa, or a ‘pre-aliya visa’, is issued while full residency is attained; A/2 is for students; A/3 for clergy; A/4, spouses and children; B/1 for work purposes and B/2 (the most common) is for short-term visitors/tourists. For passport holders of EU, North American and most Latin American states – and in addition the UK, Russia, Japan, Australia and South Africa – entry is ‘visa-on-arrival’, meaning that a B/2 Visitor Visa is issued on arrival and is valid for three months (Shamir & Mundlak, 2013).

Significant within these details is that dealings with COGAT for West Bank and Gaza visas can be, in the words of more than one interviewee in this research, a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’ and that therefore a great majority of international visitors to Palestine – students, workers and tourists included – enter on a category B/2 three-month Visitor Visa that can be renewed by exiting and re-entering on a ‘visa run’ to Jordan, an undertaking not without risk, as we discuss below. There is, therefore, a large proportion of internationals who attempt to enter as short-term ‘visitors’ but whose purposes are longer term study and work – and whose exposure to the bureaucratic decision is heightened by the imperative to re-attempt entry every three months. Where other types of visa are secured, for instance, a spousal visa (e.g., as spouse of a West Bank Palestinian), bureaucratic status can be no less precarious; Israel’s toughened restrictions over the past five years have severely curtailed the possibilities of a secure family life for Palestinian–international families (Griffiths & Joronen, 2019; Hass, 2017).

Internationals’ arrival in Palestine is thus subject to a successful negotiation of Israel’s visa requirements and restrictions, a process that most commonly takes place at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv. For passport holders from those states with B/2 ‘visa-on-arrival’ entry, arrivals are subject to a screening process whose thoroughness depends (in common with border securities the world over) on several factors: race, religion, country of origin, current levels of threat determined by the secret services (Mossad, Shin Bet) for use by the Israeli Ministry of Interior (Berda, 2011) and also, it must be noted, an always-present sense of arbitrariness. In practice, a credible appearance of an intention to visit Jerusalem’s historical sites or the beaches of Tel Aviv will often attract little attention and entry is smooth. More difficulty is presented if travelling alone with a history of multiple visits, or any indication of an intention to travel to the Palestinian Territories for any reason, be it business, cultural or political. Where there is suspicion, travellers are directed to a small waiting area aside the passport check booths (Paul, 2020) to be interrogated further – a process that is known for phone checks and internet searches for a traveller’s associations with pro-Palestine materials/contacts – and either issued a visa or detained and deported. Recent years have seen an escalation in the number of instances of the latter, including the following high-profile cases:

• September 2016: Adam Hanieh, a professor at SOAS, University of London, due to deliver postgraduate tuition at Birzeit University, detained and returned to London with a 10-year ban (Jadaliyya, 2016).

• April 2017: British-Palestinian Kamel Hawwash, a professor at the University of Birmingham (UK), similarly detained and returned, denying him the chance to visit his family in East Jerusalem (The Independent, 2017a).

• September 2018: Therese Zink, a physician and professor at Brown University (USA), denied entry, forcing the cancellation of a three-month training programme with Palestinian medics at An-Najah University Hospital in Nablus.

These denials are merely the most prominent amid a large increase in the exclusion of international entry and presence. While the Israeli government has issued no clarifications of a reconfigured visa policy, since 2016 there has been a marked increase in denials of entry. During this period, the advocacy group Right to Enter⁸ has documented a surge of requests for assistance from foreign passport holders in the West Bank whose visa renewals take longer to process – requiring for the first time face-to-face interviews with COGAT – and are issued, in many cases, for shorter durations (in one case, as little as two weeks for a resident of two years) and with stricter conditions (e.g., no travel to Jerusalem/Ben Gurion Airport) (Griffiths & Joronen, 2019). This coincides with a parliamentary intervention that targeted overseas workers. Amendment 28 to the Entry to Israel Law was passed in March 2017 and directly addresses the political sensibilities of many visitors to Palestine by providing for ‘the denial of entry to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) to anyone who calls for a boycott of Israel as defined in the Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott Law of 2011’. This new law is not simply causal – that is, it does not simply bolster the capacities of authorities to restrict internationals’ ability to enter and reside in Palestine (and Israel) – it is also a diagnostic effect of Israel’s decade-long tightening of restrictions on international presences in Palestine.

These restrictions have drawn a large amount of strong criticism. Amnesty International (2017) has described denied entry as ‘a blatant assault on freedom of expression’, while HRW (2019) has warned that the amendment is aimed at ‘muzzling human rights advocacy’ – staff from both organizations have been either denied entry (Amnesty, 2017) or deported (HRW, 2019). As part of a widely publicized report, the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network (2018) conducted a detailed survey in which almost half (48%) of its members identified ‘difficulty recruiting or keeping foreign staff’ as a barrier to operations, while a quarter (24%) have cancelled activities with staff or visitors from overseas. Further, OCHA (2018) has cautioned that denied entry visas ‘severely impact’ a range of areas from human rights advocacy to the provision of essential and emergency healthcare, while in a report on higher education, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (2019) describes current visa restrictions as a ‘destructive policy’ that ‘threatens to empty Palestinian classrooms and campuses of international faculty’. Important to understand from this survey of criticism is that the legislative moves to restrict entry for political reasons (i.e., for human rights documenters and supporters of boycott, divestment and sanctions – BDS) provide a formal legitimization for the restriction of all entry into Palestine, even for ostensibly non- (or less overtly) political work such as that of educators and medics. Equally important to note is that international visa restrictions are not solely – or even primarily – an issue of restricted international mobilities but one that is intimately tied to the control of Palestine in terms the provision of key services.

This point was recurrently emphasized in our interviews conducted with educators and medics who work or have worked in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and/or Gaza. Visa difficulties and lost work were common themes across the interviews, in which international restrictions were discussed as an extension of ‘internal’ im/mobilities. For instance, during interviews with staff at four higher education institutions in the West Bank the issue of domestic capacity was repeatedly cited as a key context for the hiring of international staff. One overseas professor explained that the main factor in her appointment was that ‘the department was chronically short staffed’ mainly because, in her view, ‘a lack of mobility for potential Palestinian academics [with] limited opportunities for people to go abroad and do a PhD [and] very limited opportunities for post-grad study in the West Bank’. This dynamic of the academic labour market adds multiple other mobility restrictions to be considered: for overseas study, Gazan Palestinians must obtain an exit permit from the Israeli military (Hass, 2020; The Independent, 2017b); and Jerusalemite Palestinians – subject to the ‘Center of Life’ policy (Jefferis, 2012; Nasasra, 2019) – must effectively choose between travel and retaining residency rights in their hometown. There is then the further issue of gaining visas to the hostile immigration environments of the many desirable locations for postgraduate study, the United States and UK, for instance (Hartocollis, 2019). It must also be added that there is a further layer of Palestinian im/mobility to do with uncertainty where worsening conditions under occupation connect to an anticipatory decision to stay put, as one young student articulated in a recent study: ‘I wish to obtain higher degrees but what if I return to find a demolished home?’ (Griffiths & Joronen, 2021, p. 9).

Academics from overseas are therefore sought by Palestinian institutions to fill a gap in capacities that is created – in large part – by the reduced mobilities for Palestinians to pursue postgraduate studies either within or without the Occupied Territories. In the field of health in Palestine, similar restrictions have greatly affected access and provision. This is documented in prominent medical journals (Alofs, 2002; Feder et al., 2019) and identified as a barrier to improving healthcare by international medical organizations (Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 2019; World Health Organization (WHO), 2013). From the point of view of patients, the situation is so pronounced that the WHO has, for the past nine years, published a monthly report on health access and permits. It provides these details from early 2020:

Before March, there were more than 1,750 permit applications each month for Gaza patients and more than 7,000 permit applications each month for West Bank patients. … Patients need permits to reach health services in different parts of the occupied Palestinian territory, with the majority needing access to East Jerusalem. Almost a third of applications are for cancer patients; others require specialised surgeries, diagnostic imaging, cardiology, or other services otherwise unavailable. Overall, this group of patients is very sick, with their probability of survival at six months from first permit application less than 90%.⁹

From past four years’ reports, the average rate of permit approval is 50% for Gaza and 72% from the West Bank. If that is then applied to the above figures, this would equate to approximately 900 refusals/delays per month in Gaza and about 2000 in the West Bank, all for types of sickness with an extremely poor prognosis. From the point of view of Palestinian medics, the opportunities to travel for study and training is similarly limited, with the effect of, as the UK-based non-governmental organization (NGO) MAP (2019) reports, ‘leaving them cut off from many advances in [for instance] cancer treatment and with less opportunity to update their professional skills’. MAP documents that in 2018 ‘just 15% of Palestinian health workers who applied for exit permits to leave Gaza were granted them by the Israeli authorities’ (MAP, 2019).

It is in this context that international medics seek to build relationships with hospitals and health workers in Palestine. As one UK-based general practitioner put a crucial point in interview:

the real issue is that first so many patients can’t obtain the documents to travel for treatment, then Palestinian medics are not allowed to travel outside Palestine for conferences and training – and it is this that makes international visits all the more vital.

In this way, as for overseas educators, international medics’ involvement is contingent on a series of preceding mobility denials. An illustrative example is the Scotland–Gaza Medical Bridge, a training partnership between Scottish and Gazan oncologists that ‘enables Palestinian colleagues to access updates and technical developments from around the world’ (MAP, 2019). The Medical Bridge is continually affected by mobility denials that has meant a large amount of engagement (pre-Covid-19) has taken place remotely. The root problem, however, is not gaining visas for British medics to work in Gaza but vice versa, as the partnership’s lead physician told us in interview:

if we could bring them here [to Scotland] for a couple of months to work with our team – it would be so much easier to demonstrate important procedures, the meticulousness needed in record keeping, for example – it’s hard to demonstrate some of these things [in Gaza or online].

The continued cooperation between medics on the Scotland–Gaza Medical Bridge – and similar projects that are detailed below – is hindered by severe restrictions on Palestinian movement that precede the issue of international visas.

Revealed so far in our enquiry is that Israel’s control of international mobility cannot be separated from a host of preceding and contextualizing im/mobilities for Palestinians. What we might delineate as an ‘internal’ mobility regime diminishes capacities in important provision – Palestinian education institutions are understaffed; patients and medics are denied travel for treatment/training – that elevates the importance of international mobility and thus connects the denial of entry to an effect of further diminishing the capacities of those provisions. In this way, international im/mobilities are intimately tied to Israel’s control of Palestinian mobility. From this base we can further elaborate on the ways that visa restrictions come to affect education and healthcare in Palestine.

3. THE EFFECTS OF VISA RESTRICTIONS ON PALESTINIAN EDUCATION AND HEALTHCARE

Here we build the account by drawing on both publicly available information (university statements and NGO reports) and extensive fieldwork comprising interviews with educators and medics conducted in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and via videocall. The discussion is arranged by sector and forms the substance of our claim that Israel has developed an international mobilities regime that tightens its control over Palestinian spaces.

A prominent instance of visa restrictions affecting education in Palestine is currently taking place at one of Palestine’s most prestigious higher education institutions, Birzeit University, where the targeting of overseas faculty members has come to the wider attention of Israeli (Hass, 2019, 2022) and international news outlets (Al-Jazeera, 2018; Times Higher Education, 2019), human rights organizations (Adalah, 2019; Al-Haq, 2019) and activist groups (Right to Enter, 2019; Scholars at Risk, 2019). In 2019, a public campaign and formal legal challenge was brought jointly by Birzeit’s international office and the human rights organizations Adalah and Al-Haq that seeks ‘to end discriminatory Israeli policy aimed at preventing international academics from staying in the West Bank’, citing specifically the ‘murky and arbitrary Israeli regulations [that] leave international lecturers and their families in constant uncertainty and subject to deportation at any time’ (Adalah, 2019). The details provided by Adalah (2019) illustrate the extent to which Birzeit is affected:

Between 2017 and 2019, four full-time and three part-time international lecturers at Birzeit University were compelled to leave the country and were not able to continue their teaching because Israel refused to renew their visas. In 2019, Israel denied entry to two international academics with Birzeit University contracts. Not a single international faculty member  …  was issued a visa for the length of their 2018–2019 academic year contract. As of press time, six full-time international faculty members contracted for the 2018–2019 academic year are without valid visas; another five – including a department chair – are overseas with no clear indications of whether they will be able to return and secure visas required for them to stay for the coming academic year. Over 12 departments and programmes face losing faculty members in the coming academic year because of the Israeli policy.

The disruption to teaching and research at Birzeit is significant: international staff inside Palestine are at constant threat of removal while international staff currently outside Palestine are uncertain of (re)entry. The key demand brought to the courts is one of transparency: the ‘publication of a clear and proper procedure for issuing entry visas and visa extensions for foreign academics in the West Bank’ (Attorney Sawsan Zaher, quoted in Adalah, 2019). The case is ongoing.

Birzeit is merely the most prominent example; all institutions of higher education in Palestine are subject to the same visa bureaucracy where denial and removal are constant factors in teaching, studying and research. This was emphasized during interviews with faculty and administrative staff, for instance a member of the administration at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem raised the point that even where staff gain entry, they can do so only with a three-month B/2 Visitor visa – a period shorter than a semester and one that thus compels them to complete an often risky ‘visa run’, most commonly to the notorious Allenby crossing into Jordon where a new B/2 visa is issued on re-entry (Sperlinger, 2015, p. 86). A number of interviewees were unfortunately able to evidence the risk involved in making such a trip: a British student at Bethlehem University recounted how she was refused re-entry: ‘with no explanation [at the border] and with all my things still in Bethlehem, I had to go back to Amman and haven’t seen my classmates or host family in Palestine since’; while a lecturer at Al-Quds who opted for a visa renewal through Ben Gurion Airport, recounted:

My visitor visa ran out halfway into the fall semester of 2018 … I went to [country] for a visa run, visited my family and when I returned I was expecting the three months but at the airport that they would not give me any visa beyond a week, and if I want to extend my stay I had to go to the Ministry of Interior to apply for a longer-term tourist visa. … At the Ministry of Interior they just laughed in my face and told me I have four days to leave the country in the middle of the semester.

The procedure here is opaque and the decision is arbitrary – and the abrupt order to leave is clearly disruptive not only to a member of staff’s life but to the functioning of the University. In this case – in a pre-Covid context – teaching was conducted online with unstable connections that, the lecturer summarized, ‘greatly affected the quality of my teaching … a third of the semester was wasted’.

In interviews with staff at another (anonymised) institution, the catalogue of problems presented by visa bureaucracies is long and challenging for its operations. Numerous research staff have been subject to delays (including one of six months for the institute’s former director) and denials, with some reporting ‘repeated’ interrogation and strip-searching at Ben Gurion Airport. On an occasion where a legal challenge was made, the former director recalled: ‘it cost us a lot of money – we ended up spending something like $20,000 [in legal fees] on this visa and it took fourteen months to get [the academic] here’. In this way, Israel’s visa bureaucracy bears on an educational institution’s finances, operations and administration that would inevitably redirect time and resources away from the core activities of research and teaching. A current employee at the same institution spoke openly of how ongoing visa application delays are ‘traumatic’ and ‘what ends up happening is your head gets locked in “flight mode” so you can’t think in terms of actual security and long-term’. He continued: ‘[living in] a state of bureaucratic precarity, just trying uphill constantly to ensure I can [continue to] live here’ has taken its toll, confiding that aspects of his work have suffered. While the psychological and affective dimensions of visa precarity are beyond the scope here, it is important to note that, even once entry to Palestine is granted by Israel, there persists a bureaucratic insecurity that can inhibit staff’s capacities to conduct research, deliver teaching and complete administrative duties.

The strong feeling among the staff we interviewed is one of concern at a slow erosion of Palestine’s higher education sector. ‘Entry restrictions are an attempt to sever the international connections of Palestinian universities’, as one American professor put it, that is rooted in a desire to prevent ‘people working to strengthen education capacities and therefore Palestinian society more generally’. Another expanded: ‘this visa bureaucracy is pretty much able to kill any international connectivity. … I see it as a de-development approach’, adding: ‘a big part of restricting international academics is cutting connections with international capital and transfer of knowledge’. The reference point here is to long-standing debates on the process described by Roy (1987, p. 56) that ‘undermines or weakens the ability of an economy to grow and expand by preventing it from accessing and utilizing critical inputs needed to promote internal growth’. This perspective is useful insofar as it facilitates critique of a purposeful degradation of a dependent economy to the benefit of a dominant one but the key departure here is first that the process of weakening occurs via an internationalized mechanism of control with no apparent benefit to Israel’s economy or education sector and second that a move to internationalize faculty is not so much economic as to do with something inherent to the production and dissemination of knowledge. This point was raised several times in interviews: ‘it’s having a huge impact: the closure of departments, the inability to offer certain foreign languages, the effective exclusion from the Erasmus Programme’; ‘[visa restrictions] deny Palestinian staff and students access to international scholarship, starving them of the ability to be involved in global discussions’. The emphasis here is not wholly captured within a de-development frame: there is a ‘global’ dimension to education ‘discussions’, a right to partake in international programmes such as Erasmus and a recognition that certain subject areas (e.g., modern languages) are necessarily outward-looking. This inherently inter-national view of education was addressed most succinctly as a pedagogical issue by a university administrator:

you need someone with outside experience if you want to study something like English. … If you’re studying Arabic in London or Manchester, you will lack something without an [native] Arabic teacher and European studies is the same – it doesn’t make sense to have only Palestinians teaching Palestinians about Europe – we need experts to teach and sometimes they need to come from outside … .

The language here is clearly redolent of any number of universities the world over with prominent strategies to internationalize.

Similar processes are taking place in the field of healthcare where isolation from the international medical community is related to a demonstrable stagnation in technical expertise. For the Scotland–Gaza Medical Bridge mentioned above, the objective is to train Gazan medics in cutting-edge breast cancer treatments (MAP, 2019; Nutt, 2019) with the rationale that, as the Bridge’s founding oncologist Dr Philippa Whitford detailed, ‘virtually every patient I met in 2016 [before the project] had had a mastectomy and their lymph nodes removed, this meant so many women struggling with lymphoedema’. Dr Whitford explained that this surgical intervention is outdated and can cause psychological impact among women: ‘this aggressive surgery was happening which some patients needed but by no means all and it was damaging to body image’. Progress has been made in the last four years – ‘clinicians on the Medical Bridge have really grasped it in both hands and improved service’ – but the project is continually hindered by the immobility of Gazan colleagues (discussed above) and also denial of entry for Dr Whitford and her team, for instance in 2018 when ‘a full training and treatment project was wrecked’ (Whitford, 2019).¹⁰ A second high-profile project is run by doctors affiliated to The Foundation for Family Medicine in Palestine (FFMP) that is focused on the specialism of general practice.¹¹ Dr Therese Zink explained:

Palestinian doctors aren’t really trained in ambulatory care … gathering information about how family life might inform health concerns … and thus the skills aren’t there to decide if your chest pain is a heart attack or an anxiety attack.

This results in a bottleneck of patients: ‘everybody goes to specialists, which is expensive and then the specialists are overwhelmed’. FFMP, as its chief executive officer (CEO) Dr Paul Wallace explained, aims to develop family medicine in Palestine by ensuring that ‘Palestinian doctors do not remain isolated in terms of expertise’, continuing:

while the Foundation has achieved a lot, it’s been incredibly frustrating, in part because of access and visas, [when they are denied] it’s a huge blow not to be there … there are layers of understanding and knowledge that you can only acquire face-to-face.

A recent visa denial for FFMP involved Dr Zink who was refused entry into the West Bank at Allenby Bridge, forcing her to abandon training in ambulatory care: ‘it was a huge loss to the programme, we lost three months’ engagement with Palestinian university doctors’.

The concern among the medics interviewed during the research is that the denial of visas and the subsequent erosion of international knowledge exchange is damaging a health system that is already under-resourced, not least in part because of travel restrictions in the other direction. If the denial of exit permits sets limits on Palestinian medics’ access to training, then the response of projects such as the Medical Bridge, MAP and FFMP to collaborate within Palestinian territory become all-the-more crucial, and therefore pronounced strategic points in any project to deplete healthcare services. This notion was picked up recurrently: one British doctor surmised that ‘the Israeli authorities don’t want to facilitate anything that is going to improve the lot of Palestinians because it could be argued that the current objective is to make life difficult for the people who live there’ while an American doctor stated frankly that ‘visa control is part of squeezing Palestinians to the knees, the Israeli authorities don’t want medics to be further educated … [it’s] making life miserable by throttling Palestine more and more’. Intent is not our concern here, rather it is the effects that are telling: visa restrictions contribute to the ‘squeezing’ of a population under occupation. A number of interviewees set this further in the context of an international vision of a medical community knowledge exchange, for instance, a Palestinian cardiologist asserted that ‘you can’t overestimate how important international collaboration is for all medical facilities in the West Bank and Gaza specifically because of the very challenging restrictions on physical movement in and out of Palestine’, adding: ‘[international collaboration is] absolutely paramount in order to support capacity building and institutional development … sharing knowledge with international colleagues is – I would say – even more important than financial support from the EU, development agencies, etc.’. Placed at the centre of the issue here is a firm conviction that the value of international collaboration is located less in a developmentalist vision of aid but, and once again, in the promise of shared knowledge – or, if we stretch only slightly: meaningful participation in the communities on which a scientific method depends.

In both education and healthcare, the effects of visa restrictions are thus significant, and can be said to contribute to the worsening of conditions in Palestine under occupation. But the account so far has barely scratched the surface of an international bureaucratic control of mobilities that operates at a much larger scale with potentially even more damaging consequences. It is to this issue that we finally turn.

4. THE SCALE OF THE INTERNATIONAL MOBILITIES REGIME

Under the surface so far has lain the important fact that restrictions on movement are enacted by Israel’s vast bureaucracy that regulates both Palestinians’ mobility and that of internationals. For internationals, the encounter with bureaucracy takes three primary forms: (1) a visa for entry into ‘Judea and Samaria’ (the West Bank) or Gaza is applied for at an Israeli consulate/embassy prior to travel and subjected to a notoriously slow, opaque and arbitrary process with a high probability of refusal; (2) a B/2 Visitor Visa is sought on arrival and reissued during ‘visa runs’ every three months or fewer; and (3) a B/1 (work) visa is secured (often after initial entry on a B/2 Visitor Visa) subject to strict conditions and unpredictable renewal processes. There are thus three primary outcomes: a denied visa; a granted visa with a strong sense of impermanence (a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’); or, and as we further consider here, the entire process is avoided because the expectation of denial is enough to deter potential travel. Drawing focus on these outcomes, we contend in this final section that what is documented so far is merely the beginning of the story and that the international mobilities regime runs deeper, immeasurably so: restrictions cancel work activities, lead to a loss of potentials in various sectors and even deter potential visits. In an important sense, therefore, the power of mobility control issues from a capacity to produce a significant primary effect: work activities are stalled, cancelled and even rendered inconceivable to the effect that nothing happens. To substantiate this claim, we sketch out a critical perspective on bureaucracy that reconsiders the relationship between bureaucratic practices where the question of opaqueness shifts from attending to the mechanisms within the practices of governing to the opaqueness of losing the possibilities of mobilities to an order of ‘what could have been’ (Lowe, 2015, pp. 40–41).

A base and prominent critique of the nexus between power and bureaucracy is that it functions via the obfuscation of the decision-making process. Arendt’s (1969, p. 38) words remain perhaps the most percipient on this subject where she describes bureaucracy as ‘the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule of nobody’. This ‘rule of nobody’ – or where Arendt (1969, p. 81) is less forgiving, ‘tyranny without a tyrant’ – proves a culmination of the formative modern state bureaucracy that is characterized by an opaqueness to decision-making, or to deploy two collocated adjectives: labyrinthine (e.g., Kuus, 2011) and Kafkaesque (e.g., Clegg et al., 2016). From this perspective, the power of bureaucratic formations consists in the opaqueness to decision-making process and the implicit imperative is for analysis of either a concomitant opaqueness to its (unobservable) workings or the (observable) effects of opaqueness for those brought within its ambit. So it is that, on the one hand, bureaucracy degrades accountability to the ends of enabling state–military violence (e.g., Asaro, 2017), while on the other, the ‘purposefully opaque’ (HRW, 1999) or ‘authorless’ (Povinelli, 2011, pp. 118–119) quality of bureaucracy is constitutive of political life in the context of exception or abandonment. In both cases it is opaqueness that holds the key to the power of bureaucratic mechanisms where anonymisation – by turns – facilitates all manner of violence (e.g., from targeted killing to welfare cuts) and reduces subjects to states of profound uncertainty in which, to return finally to Arendt (1969, p. 81), ‘there is nobody left with whom once can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom’. From this perspective, the opaqueness of processes and consequent irreproachability comprises the power of bureaucracy to effect control of space and population.

This convergence of opaqueness, bureaucracy and power is well documented in existing scholarship focused on Israel’s management of the population in Palestine. Peteet’s (2017, pp. 71, 85) detailed study of ‘the interlocking bureaucratic and physical obstacles to Palestinian mobility [that] penetrat[e] deep into quotidian life’ draws attention specifically to the Israeli Civil Administration’s ubiquitous permit regime as ‘a wall of sorts … a paper wall of bureaucracy’ (original emphasis). Peteet describes the ‘paper wall’ thus: ‘[a] mysterious and time-consuming process, the criteria for granting permits were unstated and hard to discern … what at first seemed arbitrary wasn’t necessarily so. Indeed, it was opacity that was consistent’. Expanding on the mechanisms and effects of permits, Berda’s (2017, p. 53) insightful account tracks the ways that Palestinians caught within such hard-to-discern bureaucratic processes are exposed to an ‘incurable administrative disease’ whereby ‘opacity … undermined people’s self-confidence in their life course, causing self-doubt and general regret, as well as fear of the future’. In a third example, Neve Gordon’s (2008, pp. 25, 29) expansive work places Israel’s ‘colossal juridical–bureaucratic apparatus’ at the centre of the evolving occupation, emphasizing its ‘structures of arbitrariness’ whose ‘lack of procedural transparency … manage[s] the population through the production of endemic uncertainty’. For each of these scholars, and others (e.g., Braverman, 2012; Feldman, 2007; Griffiths & Joronen, 2021), it is the opaque nature of bureaucracy that connects to a diffusion of anxiety and/or uncertainty among the managed population. In this sense, as Shenhav and Berda (2009, pp. 360, 361) have theorized, it is a ‘permanently anonymous’ ‘phantom sovereign’ at work in Israel’s bureaucratic practices in which ‘[t]he presence of authority is ubiquitous, omnipresent, and yet unnamed and not available for any process of appeal’. This conceptualization is useful insofar as it provides a term of address for the unknowable core of bureaucracy, one that can only be conceptualized as apparitional for its perceptible effects via imperceptible mechanisms.

There is something of this dynamic in the account offered so far in this article. Visas are refused ‘with no explanation’, processes are prolonged and unpredictable with little recourse to appeal (or only at great expense), and those who do gain entry see their work suffer because of the ‘uphill’ visa struggle. At the same time, and this is an important argument we wish to develop, in the case of Israel’s international mobility regime, power turns on a reconfigured relationship between bureaucracy and opaqueness. This takes place via a potentially more significant and immeasurable (non-)occurrence where the very prospect and capacity of visa restrictions pre-emptively deters people from attempting to enter Palestine. That is, the bureaucratic process of obtaining a visa and the likelihood of denial is enough in itself for people to decide pre-emptively to remain in place. One example of this was related by a visiting lecturer at Al-Quds University speaking on the topic of recruitment: ‘they had lots of problems hiring international staff because the complexity of trying to navigate the visa system would put a lot of people off applying in the first place’. The gesture here is towards unclear processes that act as a deterrent with a corollary effect of uncountable numbers of people with abandoned plans to work in Palestine. The extent to which this occurs cannot be known but it was commonly highlighted that, for all the difficulties among interviewees, ‘the other story is that people who would go never apply to go because they wouldn’t get a visa’ (US doctor). One particular example, from a Palestinian doctor at a West Bank hospital, provides a strong imperative to dig deeper:

there are so many Palestinian doctors who live in USA, UK, Canada who would come – Palestine [the diaspora] has almost as many doctors [per capita] as Cuba – they would come but they know that there’s no chance for them to get a visa so there’s no point [even trying].¹²

To push the point, the interviewee in this case gave names of high-profile Palestinian doctors who ‘would come tomorrow’ but for the knowledge that entry would be denied. Many elements come together here, not least a troubling of the category ‘international’ that we reference above and a more pointed contact with Israel’s settler colonialism where entry becomes ‘return’ for those whose international status is owed to forced displacement in the years since 1948. This heightens the importance of what we describe here: Israel’s international mobility regime functions as an effective deterrent such that entry into Palestine is not even attempted for the expectation of visa denial.

As an object of research, deterrent is methodologically elusive for the simple fact that it denotes a disengagement from the site of focus: ‘what about when the technology is a deterrence and there’s nothing to apprehend?’ (Boyce & Chambers, 2021, p. 3). To gain some critical purchase on the (absent) effects of deterrence, we turn to studies in colonial historiography that signal an innovative and productive way of dealing with this impasse. Lowe’s (2015, pp. 40–41) work to raise tension in colonial histories by attending to a conditional temporality – or ‘what could have been’ – considers the ‘multiple contingent possibilities’ foreclosed by colonialism: ‘a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science, and also the matters absent, entangled, and left unavailable by its methods’. For Lowe (2015, pp. 40–41) – and other historians (e.g., Smallwood, 2007) – entering into this conditional both requires and reveals a ‘space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss’, with powerful results specific to the Atlantic slave trade and the development of Western liberalism. While our scope is rather more modest, adopting a similar viewpoint can open up the issue of visa restrictions to manifold effects connected to not travelling – and indeed, not even attempting to travel/travel is inconceivable – to render visible the effects that are otherwise kept from view. Specific instances in the research interviews take on new significance in this light. A British-Palestinian professor’s abandoned project is now marked by lost opportunities:

it would have been to work with Palestinian universities on how they could improve their engineering curricula by aligning market-place needs and skills training … we wanted to work with them – I had been discussing this and to apply for EU Horizon 2020 funding.

Similarly, the cancelled training for family physicians in the West Bank and oncologists in Gaza (detailed above) may have sustained a skills gap with unknowable consequences – and even if that gap was (belatedly) filled at reorganized events or it was delivered online, the cancelled training would have prolonged a time period in which the quality of provision may have been reduced, a period in which care suffered, health deteriorated and the ultimate loss could have happened? For instances where the prospect of denied entry is enough to set the idea of working in Palestine – such as in the case of those Palestinian Canadian doctors who ‘would come tomorrow’ – outside the realms of possibility, Israel’s control over international mobilities deters manifold possibilities, innumerable woulds and would haves that amount to lost collaborations and treatments we can never fully know.

Attending to these ‘scene[s] of loss’ – ‘the moments of eclipse when obscure, unknown, or unperceived elements are lost’ (Lowe, 2015, p. 175) – presents a step towards apprehending something of the scale of Israel’s international mobility regime. The relations of bureaucracy and opaqueness move to a different level in this sense such that we might posit that the metaphor of the ‘phantom sovereign’ at the heart of the bureaucratic decision (Shenhav & Berda, 2009, p. 360) can be extended to think of ‘phantom effects’, from cancelled medical training to the countless (and uncountable) decisions to avoid travel altogether. It is only in this detail that the extensive geographies of Israel’s international mobility regime begin to come into view and that the study of bureaucracy might apprehend what is surely its most prevalent effect: to make nothing happen.

5. CONCLUSIONS

Crucially, of course, that nothing happens is merely a primary effect and in fact the knock-on effects of Israel’s visa bureaucracy are significant for Israel’s control of Palestinian space. The work of this article has been to examine this control as an ‘international mobilities regime’ that connects to a host of preceding and contextualizing internal controls of mobility – ones that contribute to the understaffing of university departments and limited access to healthcare and professional training – to exacerbate sectoral challenges, specifically in the areas of education and healthcare. The connections between Israel’s domestic and international control of mobility in/to Palestine are thus intimate and aligned towards maintaining control over Palestinian space where, as we have discussed, student learning is disrupted, academic staff live a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’, and medical techniques stagnate. A central issue then becomes one of scale that, as we have sought to explicate, is methodologically challenging for the fact that Israel’s visa bureaucracy effects an absence of people, activities and, even, applications – people are deterred from attempting entry. Our approach to detecting such absences draws from work in colonial historiography that attends to a conditional temporality of what could be or what could have been that, we argue, goes some way towards apprehending the scale of Israel’s international mobilities regime. There are untold numbers of internationals – among them many Palestinian diaspora educators and medics – whose wish to work in Palestine is not even registered among the growing numbers of denials and deportations. Scratching the surface, as we have done here, provides an indication that these lost possibilities are significant and should be brought into sustained consideration of the international dimensions of Israel’s colonial project in Palestine.

Approaching bureaucracy in this way represents a key contribution of the research presented here. Current work on power, space and bureaucracy is dedicated to examining the innerworkings of bureaucratic formations, the ways they obscure the decision-making process, foreclose recourse to appeal and impose long periods of precarious waiting that are filled with anxiety, fear and/or hope (Berda, 2017; Joronen, 2017; Khosravi, 2017; Parla, 2019). Currently outside of such enquiry is the function of bureaucracy-as-deterrent and its diagnostic figure, the absent applicant. For obvious reasons, this figure is only tentatively detected here but further research might make methods sensitive to those who pre-emptively avoid bureaucracy to thus build a fuller picture of the effects of state impositions of administrative barriers. A second important contribution of the article is the elaboration of an international dimension to place-specific oppression. Many additional questions have been raised during the course of the research, prominent among which was a conviction among interviewees that visa restrictions curtail witnessing, as one doctor put it: ‘if you’re running a police state and an occupation … then you’re always going to be concerned about people seeing that’. This is part of a separate enquiry and takes the issue of witnessing beyond the confines of human rights organizations and NGOs, where Amendment 28 to the Entry to Israel Law (discussed above) explicitly targets political work, and into a more general category of international presence in Palestine. This gives the lie to any Israeli claim that mobility restrictions are harnessed to a variable ‘security threat’, showing instead an ever-present mechanism for controlling all entry at all times into the territories it occupies. The trend is troubling: if educators and medics are in fact subject to denial according to the Amendment, then its already-pernicious use to deport human rights documenters – for example, HRW Country Director Omar Shakir (Al-Jazeera, 2019) – makes it an even more urgent site for examination with reference to the control of the mobility of information. Aside this, of course, must emerge a full consideration of the racialized economies of witnessing where ‘white voices’ remain the currency of international news legitimacy (Gilbert & Fosse, 2010, pp. 135–136).

A third and final contribution that we wish to emphasize in closing is a connection with scholarly attention to the less spectacular mechanisms of power that do not make headlines but are not less part of the occupation than, for instance, aerial bombardment, military checkpoints, house demolitions and so forth. Despite careful work on the less spectacular (e.g., Joronen, 2021; Kelly, 2008; Meneley, 2019), a large part of commentary on Palestine–Israel, as Makdisi (2010, p. 268) has written, remains focused on ‘those forms of violence that lend themselves in one way or another to televisual spectacle’ which has the effect of:

overshadowing, even displacing, the much less visible but equally deadly effects of the Israeli apparatuses of bureaucracy and control in the occupied territories, which by its nature does not lend itself to televised images (unless you can imagine a five-hour sequence of a man standing in line).

A less spectacular scholarship, it follows, one located in the details of bureaucratic queues, forms, requirements, obfuscations, deterrence, can reveal equally (or perhaps, for their subtlety, more) effective technologies of control that inflect the lives of targeted populations (see also Joronen, 2021). To this end we now know that for every bomb dropped there is extensive legal discourse (Jones, 2020), for each checkpoint crossing there is a permit requirement (Berda, 2017; Griffiths & Repo, 2021), and for demolition to take place there is a military or civil order (Joronen & Griffiths, 2019). There are, further, those formations of bureaucracy that do not accompany such visible sites/sights of violence but through which, nonetheless, violence emerges via material costs to education and health. Israel’s international mobilities regime is one such site; it is a pervasive and large-scale bureaucratic mechanism that tightens control over Palestinian spaces by heavily restricting the activities of educators and medics. Impacts on other sectors (e.g., human rights work) are probable and parallel administrative barriers are likely, and there remains a large amount of work to be conducted on the connections between extended bureaucratic reach and the corollary effects for targeted populations in Palestine and beyond.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank those interviewed for this research, including those who declined for fear of repercussions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of the British Academy-funded project ‘The Effects of Israel’s Visa Restriction in Palestine on Family, Social and Political Life’ [grant number IC4/100169].

Notes

1 Here and throughout we refer to ‘internationals’ while acknowledging two important shortcomings of the term: (1) by far the largest number of ‘internationals’ (in terms of holding non-Palestinian or non-Israeli documents) are Palestinian residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem who hold Jordanian passports (but most often not citizenship); (2) and many ‘internationals’ with passports and citizenship of North American and European states, including a number we interviewed for this research, are Palestinian whose families have been displaced in the years since 1948. The term ‘internationals’ here is thus used as shorthand to refer to those who require a visa to enter or reside in the Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

2 There are two points of interest here: some of those we interviewed for the research are Jewish (but not Israeli citizens); and many others would be identified as ‘white European/American’.

3 On third states and international humanitarian law, see Asarov (2014); and http://www.righttoenter.ps/third-states/.

4 The continued denial of the Palestinian right of return is another – crucial – aspect of an international mobilities regime enforced by Israel.

5 It must be acknowledged that these difficulties can be profound, see, for example, the cases of European and US citizens married to Palestinians whose visa restrictions threaten access to spouses and children (Griffiths & Joronen, 2019; Hass, 2017).

6 This includes Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza where crossings are ‘managed by the Israeli military working with Egyptian security services’ (Alijla, 2020, p. 11).

7 For the order (in Hebrew), see https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/policy/procedureforenteringforeignersintojudeaandsamaria/he/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%94%D7%9C%20%D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%AA%20%D7%96%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D%20%D7%9C%D7.

8 See righttoenter.ps/.

9 See http://www.emro.who.int/pse/publications-who/monthly-referral-reports.html/.

10 Dr Whitford raised this in her capacity as a UK Member of Parliament; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymgmPgLO_L0.

11 General practice in the UK; family medicine in the United States: the first tier of medical care to do with life context and health.

12 Relatedly, from a recent correspondence in The Lancet:

at present, it is almost impossible for Palestinian doctors living in the diaspora outside of Israel to obtain a visa to work in Palestinian universities and health-care institutions. For example, the relatively new Department of Family and Community Medicine at An-Najah National University in Nablus, which has been central to the achievement of WHO universal health coverage goals, finds it difficult to obtain permission for visiting academics.(Feder et al., 2019)