Thursday, June 19, 2008

Who's in charge here, anyway? Oh ...


Well, isn't this a fine "how do you do?":

On another issue of friction between the United States and its closest Mideast ally, Rice said she sees no reason that Israel has not yet approved travel papers for Palestinian students from the Gaza Strip who won prestigious Fulbright scholarships for study in the U.S.

Three of the seven scholarship winners have been held up because of unspecified security concerns. The students had been told by U.S. diplomats that they could not use their fellowships this year because Israel did not approve travel papers, but Rice intervened.

I'm sorry ... three Palestinians couldn't travel to the U.S. because Israel had not approved their travel papers? Would someone care to explain that to me?

4 comments:

Cameron Campbell said...

There are no airports in the Gaza Strip so they have to go to Israel to fly out?

toujoursdan said...

It looks like the Gaza Airport is closed.

Yasser Arafat International Airport

What's interesting is that Gaza shares a land border with Egypt, but Israel has control over the crossing and Egypt reclosed the border after the breach back in January.

mohamad said...

They can travel via Egypt, why do they need Israeli papers????

May be it is a new democracy that we are not aware of.

Mattt Enss said...

There's a reason why they refer to Palestine as the "occupied territories". It's because they're occupied by Israel. Israel controls all movement in and out of the occupied territories, ostensibly to keep weapons out and terrorists in.