U.S. will allow Israeli travelers into the country without visas

WASHINGTON —  The United States has agreed to admit Israel into the elite category of countries whose citizens can travel to the U.S. without visas, despite questions over whether Israel meets a core U.S. requirement for the special status: that Israel allow Palestinian Americans to travel freely in its territory.

U.S. officials Wednesday announced the decision to grant Israel admission to the visa-waiver program, to which 40 mostly Western countries already belong.

“The designation of Israel into the Visa Waiver Program is an important recognition of our shared security interests and the close cooperation between our two countries,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a joint statement with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

The new designation “will enhance freedom of movement for U.S. citizens, including those living in the Palestinian Territories or traveling to and from them,” Blinken said.

The decision comes after a two-month test period in which Israel was to prove its eligibility by eliminating long-standing restrictions on Palestinian Americans who attempt to travel in Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If traveling to the West Bank from abroad, they have generally not been allowed to transit through the only international airport in the area, near Tel Aviv, but must instead go overland from neighboring Jordan. And travel within Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is complicated for Palestinian Americans, as for most Palestinians, by Israeli military checkpoints that often block their passage.

But Biden administration officials said it believed the requirements for easing travel restrictions to the U.S. had been met.

The requirements include “confirmation that a country issues secure travel documents [and] extends visa-free privileges to all U.S. citizens without regard to national origin, religion, or ethnicity,” Mayorkas and Blinken said in the statement.

The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, however, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security alleging that Israel had failed to meet the program’s visa-waiver requirements. Anecdotally, a number of Palestinian Americans have reported the same harassment and prolonged questioning at Israeli military checkpoints or border crossings that have gone on for years. Others, though, have said travel was easier.

Americans for Peace Now, a U.S.-based, progressive organization that focuses on Israel, said Wednesday that while it supports including the country in the no-visa program, entry now was “premature.”

“We realize that Israel has gone a long way toward crossing the threshold that would deem it as complying with the program’s requirements, and support those steps it has taken,” the organization said in a statement. “But it has not crossed the threshold. ... It is clear that important obstacles, which have been standing in the way of establishing US-Israeli reciprocity, have not yet been lifted.”

The State Department, working with the DHS, said it set up a system to monitor how “tens of thousands” of Palestinian Americans were being treated by Israel in their efforts to transit by inviting their comments.

“We will monitor ongoing compliance with the program and have the ability to take steps up to and including excluding countries from the program going forward if they fail to stay in compliance,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday.

The U.S. is apparently allowing Israel to make some exception for Palestinian Americans from the volatile Gaza Strip, which critics say undermines the entire concept of reciprocity.

Miller said the situation in Gaza affords an exception because it is controlled by a “foreign terrorist organization.” He was apparently referring to Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that has governed Gaza for years and is regarded as a terror group by Israel and the U.S.

The no-visa travel for Israelis will go into effect Nov. 30, U.S. officials said.

It is a status Israel long sought.

“We have been working on this for years, almost a decade,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in Jerusalem, as quoted by Agence France Presse. Netanyahu met with President Biden last week on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.

“I would like to express our appreciation to [Biden] for his support of the initiative, which will further strengthen ties between the two peoples,” he said.