By Daoud Kuttab

“My homeland is not a suitcase and I am not a traveller,” wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

But for many Palestinians living in the besieged homeland, the right to movement guaranteed in the University Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13) is just ink on paper.

I met last week in Beirut a Palestinian woman from Gaza who had spent four days trapped in a Cairo airport basement along with tens of others awaiting a visa.

Her ordeal began when she tried to exit Gaza. Hamas, which controls the border crossing with Egypt, assigns a person a particular day (usually a couple of weeks after applying) to travel.

Since one does not know exactly when that day is, it is often hard to calibrate one’s life.

Meral (not her real name) was invited to a media conference in Beirut whose sponsors had applied for a visa for her, which had not come on the day she was told she could travel.

Having traveled many times before and usually allowed into Egypt, she decided to take the risk for, if she did not use her allotted day, she would have missed the conference.

The Egyptian authorities, according to her, made travel much more difficult since Fatah and Hamas created the unity government.

Women, for example, used to be allowed into Egypt freely; this time, Meral was not allowed.

The fact that she is married to a Turkish journalist made the Egyptians even more determined not to let her go, simply because Cairo and Ankara are not seeing eye to eye politically these days. Continue Reading »