The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian

The first time I travelled outside of Gaza, I was twenty-seven years old. Growing up, I had always thought of “travel” as riding a taxi, bus, or bike within the borders of the Gaza Strip. My family lived not far from Railway Street, but there were no trains there. I had heard stories about the Gaza International Airport, but Israel had bombed it when I was eight. I remember asking my childhood friend Izzat, a soccer fan, about the places he wanted to visit one day. “Barcelona,” he told me. “I want to play alongside Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta.” In 2014, a few days after Izzat graduated from college, he was killed in an Israeli air strike. Our freedom of movement was just another victim of the occupation.

The first place I tried to visit was Boston. I needed a U.S. visa, but was not allowed to travel forty miles to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, or to drive four hours through Israel to the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Instead, my brother-in-law drove me to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, in southern Gaza, so I could fly to Jordan for my visa interview. I remember standing in the travel hall in Rafah, surrounded by the young, the old, and the sick, and thinking that my suitcase, like me, had never been on a real journey before. When my plane took off from Cairo International Airport, I had the feeling that my legs were shrinking below me.

At the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, an officer handed me a list of personal information that I would need to provide: home addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, the names of my siblings and children. My fifteen-year travel history was blank. I did not know how long the decision would take—only that I could not go back to Gaza while I was waiting. After forty days of limbo, living in a rented apartment in Amman, I finally got the visa. In the years that followed, I was lucky to go on many trips.

Since October 7th, it has been difficult to exit Gaza at all. My immediate family was able to leave in November because my youngest son, Mostafa, has a U.S. passport. On our way to Egypt, however, Israeli soldiers separated me from my family, beat me, and interrogated me. In December, my mother applied to travel to Qatar with my twenty-year-old sister, Afnan, who needed medical care for a rare genetic disorder. They were not approved until late March. Afnan, who has the vocabulary of a four-year-old, could barely understand the broken Arabic of Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. My mother nearly fainted during a four-kilometre walk in the sun. In Gaza, this is what travel means now.

In June, I took another trip. My family was relocating from Egypt to Syracuse, New York, and we planned to visit my mother and sister in Doha on the way there. We were excited. In the two-hour van ride to the airport, I took photos, and Yazzan, my eight-year-old son, looked out the window and asked questions. In Doha, my mother and sister greeted us at the entrance to their building. I laughed when I looked in their fridge, which was stocked with fresh foods that were impossible to find in wartime Gaza. “Look what you have!” I told my mother. “Mango, cherry, cucumber, cheese, and more.”

She looked guilty, not happy. “I wish I stayed with your father and your siblings and their kids,” she told me. She had waited months to come to Doha, only to wonder if she never should have left. She said that Afnan was so afraid of going home that she was refusing to leave the apartment for days on end.

We stayed for a week. Then, on the morning of June 18th, we woke up early and collected our suitcases. My mother stood in silence, avoiding our eyes. I promised her that we would meet soon in Gaza, but both of us knew that we might be away from home for a long time.

On our way to the airport, the sun shone gracefully above the Persian Gulf. I felt proud that we had made it this far. We were sitting and waiting for our flight when a young man, who was tapping something into his phone, looked up at me and spoke in Arabic. “Are you Mosab? Mosab Abu Toha?”

I pretended not to know the name, but my kids gave me away. “Yes, this is Mosab!” my daughter Yaffa said. “He is kidding.”

The man smiled. I smiled at the kids, then at him. “How do you know me?”

“I know your story. Is it not you who was detained by the Israeli Army?”

“Yes. In fact, I was kidnapped, not detained.”

The young man was Palestinian, like us. He studied at M.I.T. but had recently helped his family evacuate Gaza and resettle in Qatar. I was amazed that two Gazans could meet by accident, like two fish finding each other in an ocean. That is the nature of the diaspora: Palestinians who might once have met in Gaza now bump into one another in airports.

When my family landed in Boston, for a layover, Mostafa jumped on one of our carry-on suitcases and asked me to pull him along. This was becoming his favorite kind of travel. In line for immigration, he started to sneak under the stanchions, laughing, his little face triumphant. Then it was our turn to step up to a booth. I handed over our passports and visas to a woman in a uniform.

When I saw the woman’s reaction, I started to wonder whether something was wrong. She spoke into a radio. Then a muscular young man with a metal badge, who had a Taser, a pistol, and handcuffs on his vest, escorted us to a waiting area. After my experience with Israeli soldiers, I was nervous, but I didn’t want my family to notice. “We need to go to our new house,” Yazzan said impatiently. Finally, a young customs officer came over to talk to me.

I was surprised by the officer’s kindness. He seemed concerned about whether my family in Gaza was safe and had enough food. When he was done asking questions, he gave our passports back and even offered to help us with our suitcases. I was starting to relax, and I texted a few friends. “All good,” I wrote to them. “Collecting our bags.”

Before we could board our connecting flight, we had to pass through security again. My boarding pass seemed to trigger another alert. The officer reached for a radio and said, “Supervisor!”

The supervisor appeared behind the officer and looked at the screen. They chatted in a low voice before eyeing me. It turned out that a string of four letters had been printed on my ticket: “SSSS,” for Secondary Security Screening Selection. “Your wife and kids can proceed,” the supervisor said. “I will have to ask you to follow me.”

This time, I was told to pass through a metal detector and then a millimetre-wave scanner. Neither seemed to find anything. A T.S.A. employee asked if he could pat me down. I said yes. The employee ran his fingers around my collar and down my chest. Bystanders seemed to avert their eyes. I scanned the crowd and spotted my wife, Maram, in the distance, seeming to look for me. I wanted to shout to her, to reassure her, but I feared that would only make things worse. Then, with the back of his hand, the officer touched my private parts and my bottom. I knew that this sometimes happened to travellers. But for a moment, I felt as upset as I had been in Israeli custody.

While the officer swabbed my palms for explosives, Yaffa finally spotted me and tried to beckon me over. “I will join you when Uncle is done,” I said in Arabic, acting like the T.S.A. agent was a relative so she would not be scared. Finally, the supervisor left to photocopy my passport. When he came back, he said we were done.

“Before I go, I have to tell you something,” I replied. He listened.

“I was kidnapped by the Israeli Army in November, before being stripped of my clothes,” I told him. “Today, you come and separate me from my wife and kids, just like the Army did a few months ago.”

He nodded, looking embarrassed. I asked him whether he would do the same to travellers from Israel. I thought about how Israeli settlers, who live on Palestinian land in violation of international law, can travel to the U.S. without a visa. “This is random selection,” he told me. “It’s not meant for you.”