Schatz should oppose including Israel in visa-waiver program

I am a Native Hawaiian born and raised in Pearl City.

Last summer I traveled to Ramallah, Palestine, to teach in an SAT prep program at a Quaker school for Palestinian students. Although I knew very little about the conflict prior to the trip, I quickly learned about Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians, and as a Native Hawaiian, I deeply empathized with the Palestinian story of colonization and ethnic cleansing.

For this reason, it was particularly troubling to see Hawaii’s own U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz co-sponsoring a bill to include Israel in the U.S. visa-waiver program, which would codify into law Israel’s policy of discrimination based on race, religion and political beliefs, and give U.S. support to discrimination against American citizens traveling abroad.

Schatz is supporting a bill that ignores Hawaii’s history of colonization and exploitation of native populations; the bill facilitates a similarly exploitative process.

The bill would grant visa reciprocity to Israel. But Israel has a long track record of denying entrance to Americans of Palestinian ancestry and various Americans who support Palestinian equal rights.

In short, Israel has no intention of authentic reciprocity; instead, Israel intends to use the vast and vague leeway of a "security" exception to deny entry to nonviolent American citizens with no history of crime or threat.

Israel gets to have its cake and eat it, too. While America will grant visa waivers to Israeli citizens, Israeli intelligence and customs will be free to deny entrance to American citizens. As columnist Glenn Greenwald notes, and as the bill’s language states, Israel will get a pass provided it demonstrates it has made "every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens."

This would be a unique exception; no other country is allowed to selectively apply visa reciprocity based on ethnic, religious and ideological considerations.

U.S. policymakers and the State Department are quite aware of Israel’s discriminatory policies. The State Department has issued the following travel advisory: "Some U.S. citizens holding Israeli nationality, possessing a Palestinian identity card, or of Arab or Muslim origin have experienced significant difficulties in entering or exiting Israel or the West Bank."

The State Department is also aware that Israel ignores that Americans of Palestinian descent have rights as American citizens: "(Palestinian Authority) ID holders, as well as persons believed to have claim to a PA ID by virtue of ancestry, will be treated for immigration purposes as residents of the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether they also hold U.S. citizenship."

This initiative seems even more ironic given the case of Nour Joudah, an American of Palestinian descent denied entry despite the fact she had a one-year multi-entry visa.

Israeli customs cited "security concerns" (strikingly similar to the exception Israel supporters want written into the visa-waiver bill) as the reason for preventing Nour from returning to the Friends School, leaving her ninth-grade students without their English teacher.

These are the very same students I will be teaching this summer.

Finally, Israel’s desire to have this exception written into the visa-waiver agreement is not an aberration; it’s emblematic of Israel’s policy of displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, beginning with the ethnic cleansing campaign during the war of 1948, all the way up to today, with ongoing illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It is time for the U.S. to require Israel to respect human rights rather than provide cover for Israel’s discriminatory actions against Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans.

Hawaii’s people — and Sen. Schatz — should not play any role in supporting an Israeli government whose goal is to drive Palestinians from their land and keep them from returning.

Our own Hawaiian history demonstrates the disastrous cost of such policies.