So the West Bank is an "occupied territory".
One consequence of this: the Israelis require that every Palestinian have an ID card. (Officially it's called a West Bank Residence Card.) They're occupying the territory, they want to know who lives there. You have to present your card any time you cross a checkpoint, or whenever an IDF soldier demands it.
Your card contains the usual ID information, including your home address.
So what if you're a Palestinian in the West Bank, but your ID says "Gaza"?
Well, you probably get sent to jail or deported. Israel doesn't let Palestinians out of Gaza, except under some narrowly definied circumstances -- humanitarian, mostly. And it doesn't want Palestinians moving from Gaza to the West Bank.
Makes sense, right? Gaza is an overcrowded hellhole with pretty much no hope of improvement in the near term. The West Bank is pretty messed up too, but compared to Gaza it's Switzerland -- less crowded, better roads and schools, more jobs. If Palestinians could move freely between the two parts of their "country", there'd be hundreds of Gazans getting off the bus in Ramallah every day. Since Israel is trying to push more Israelis into the already-crowded West Bank, they're hardly going to allow a flood of more Palestinians. So, no Gazans allowed.
Nonetheless, some number of Gazans -- about 35,000 according to Israeli sources -- have by various means made it into the West Bank. A little over 1% of the population, say. Israel has always claimed the right to deport these people back to Gaza, possibly with a stop in jail along the way. Officially they're "infiltrators", and Israel has a thing about infiltrators.
But earlier this year, Israel upped the ante. Until recently, the Israelis claimed the right to grab and deport anyone who had "knowingly" entered the West Bank illegally after first passing through one of the neighboring countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria). Military Order 1650, which went into effect in April of this year, changed this. Now Israel can deport anyone who entered the West Bank unlawfully, or who is present in the West Bank without a permit. (Text of the order here, if you're interested.) So it covers not only Gazans, but any Palestinian who doesn't have a proper permit. Violators are to be judged by the IDF, not a civilian court; there is no right of appeal.
So far, this has only led to handful of deportations, all of Gazans. But the Order gives the IDF a pretty broad grant of power. If it decided to start doing sweeps and roundups, checking Palestinians for their IDs, and deporting anyone found without one, it could. There was a flurry of concern about this six months ago when the Order went into effect (including a statement from South Africa that the Order was "reminiscent of pass laws under apartheid"). It has since subsided, as the fears of mass deportations have not materialized. But the Order is still on the books.
There's a lot of other stuff to blog about here. This one just struck me, is all.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.
For non-Americans -- and, I don't know, Americans under thirty? -- Loving was the case in which the US Supreme Court decided that individual states could not prohibit interracial marriages.
Mildred Loving is still alive, and made a
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