18/06/2026
Hurray - welcome - and the right to travel (picture shows some of our West Bank friends at Amman airport today)
The issue of travel is huge for Palestinians. Gazans are under a complete siege. Did you know there are severe restrictions in travel for West Bankers too, living under this cruel apartheid Israeli occupation?
Today we're happy that our visitors are finally on the way from Palestine and we'll see them in London this evening. We're grateful that they got through the 'bridge' (the border) without too much trouble.
But we and our guests will start to worry about their return journey very soon because an organised arrangement of humiliation and corruption is operating on the 'bridges' (borders) between Palestine and Jordan that makes it a fight and not a right to get home safely and comfortably.
At root is the Israeli occupation and its wish to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Palestinians - it would like them to find things so difficult that if they can they will leave.
The West Bank has three or four million people but they are almost completely prevented from travelling out. To the north, west and south by Israel's walls, checkpoints and racist pass laws. On the east, their routes out and in for work and leisure are the 'bridges' to Jordan which have long been difficult slow and expensive to get though.
On the way out, Palestinians pay taxes to Israel and then entry taxes to jordan; and the system has long been hours of waiting in many stages
But since 2023, Israel has made the situation even harder on the way back. For its own reasons, it has decided to limit the number of Palestinians returning home to 2500 a day even in high season. This causes pain and long waits in the merciless heat of the Jordan Valley, and it fuels a whole system of corruption, price rises and difficulty.
Last autumn, our youth group returning to Palestine after a CADFA visit to the UK had to stay in a hotel in Amman for two nights on the way home because even though they had complied with a system now required and had a booking to return , there were too many people before them on the bridge , and they had to go back and stay in Amman.
There is another paid route, called VIP, which benefits obviously from people's desperation, as do the Amman hotels and restaurants.
For the Palestinians, the humiliation and oppression of the israeli checkpoints meets them before they've even reached home. A pre-taste of mass imprisonment.
Israel is used to treating Palestinians as worthless, and this war of attrition wastes Palestinians' time, energy, patience, health and isolates them all as the same horror of travel their families when they want to visit the West Bank from other parts of the world, obviously demotivating them.
Israel has no aims to improve the system at hopes that it will encourage the people who can leave to abandon the effort to live with human rights on their land.
