Over the weekend, I wrote a post about Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian writer who, when trying to return to her home in Palestine from the United States, was held for 36 hours at the Cairo airport, and ultimately refused passage to Palestine and forced, along with her two young children to return to the U.S. As a result of the ordeal both she and her children became quite ill and it has taken her a few days to write the details of her horrendous experience. It is now posted on her blog, where she writes about why she was not allowed into Palestine:
I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.
It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identity.
It is a long post, but one which I will excerpt no further because it should be read in its riveting entirety.
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