Word: gaza
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...overgrown child seeking out a real life action movie. I will walk into Gaza with my eyes open and a deep understanding of the political and military situation there. I have studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for nearly ten years, I have edited a peer-reviewed book on the subject, and I have lived and worked in both Israel and the West Bank for extended periods of time...
Despite the existence of this mechanism and its regular employment, the U.S. embassy refused to send a fax to the ministry with only a copy of my passport and a letter from the Harvard School of Public Health explaining my reason for travel to Gaza. “We do not offer that service,” the Chief of American Citizen Services told me. “You don’t help Americans communicate with the Egyptian government?” I asked indignantly after having been in Cairo for two weeks. “Not about traveling...
...contrary, on Dec. 27, the first full day I was in Cairo, I went to the embassy and told them why I was in Egypt. They brought me a sworn affidavit, which I willingly signed, stating that I understood that the State Department had determined that travel to the Gaza Strip was unsafe. The affidavit explicitly states, “I assume the risk for myself…I also understand that the Embassy cannot provide me with consular services in the Gaza Strip...
...some are thrill seekers who want to “go where the action is,” as one put it to me. The Mezan Center for Human Rights, the respected Palestinian non-governmental organization that I was scheduled to work with, expressed reservations about having me in Gaza for exactly this reason. Hardly anyone doubts that people who are going to Gaza because they saw bombs exploding there should be told that the Marines will not rush in to save them when they get themselves into trouble...
Indeed, I confess that I dread seeing the human misery of Gaza in person, eating the contaminated and inferior food grown in a wrecked environment, drinking the saline, contaminated, and infected water, and walking through hospitals starved of medicines and surgical equipment. Research in a place like Gaza is inherently risky. But the work of academics like myself is important, both to me personally and to such disparate fields as public health and strategic analysis. I understand that travel to a land under siege and ruled by force is dangerous. But I accepted these risks. Why did the U.S. government...