Over the course of a few days in July, three US citizens of Palestinian descent were denied entry into Israel. All three have published detailed testimonials of their experiences.
George Khoury, professor and theologian, has been a naturalized US citizen since 1975. His visit to Israel as part of a religious pilgrimage in late July ended in the detention center at Ben Gurion Airport. For Israeli airport security, the problem was that 46 years ago, in 1969, Khoury had lived in the West Bank city of Beit Jala while he studied at its well-known Latin Seminary. While Khoury, 70, has been a US citizen for over 40 years now, he is still treated as a Palestinian national by the Israeli airport authorities.
In the early morning hours of July 21, Khoury was taken by car to a detention center outside the airport, where he was held for over a day before being rushed back to the airport to catch a departing flight. It then appeared that the security officials thought he was another detainee called Carlos. When they realized he wasn't Carlos, they brought him back to the detention center where he had to wait for his flight. Khoury was eventually deported back to San Francisco, arriving late on July 23, without having been allowed during the layover in Italy to get his passport and travel to Jordan. He had hoped he could enter the West Bank via the Jordan River crossing or at least continue the Jordanian leg of the pilgrimage he was on.
On July 29, Khoury published the exchanges he had with Israeli passport control officers and the guards at the detention center.
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