Most Unwelcome: Prominent US Human Rights Campaigners Denied Entry to Israel

The executive director and board chair of a prominent U.S. human rights group were denied entry by the Israeli government on Monday—detained at the international airport in Tel Aviv for hours of questioning and delay before being put back on a plane out of the country.

Though they arrived with a plan to witness and document the human rights situation in both Israel and Occupied Palestine, both Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and Katherine Franke, chair of group’s board and a law professor at Columbia University, were detained upon their arrival on Sunday at Ben Gurion International Airport.

“Our trip sought to explore the intersection of Black and Brown people’s experiences in the U.S. with the situation of Palestinians, and Israel could not have made that connection clearer.”
—Vince Warren, Center for Constitutional RightsAfter being held by Israeli authorities for 14 hours, the pair said they were denied permission to officially enter the company and were placed back on a flight to New York.

“The Israeli government denied us entry, apparently because it feared letting in people who might challenge its policies. This is something that we should neither accept nor condone from a country that calls itself a democracy,” Warren said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our trip sought to explore the intersection of Black and Brown people’s experiences in the U.S. with the situation of Palestinians, and Israel could not have made that connection clearer.”

Israeli has been criticized in recent years for increasingly barring human rights experts and campaigners from entering the country and this latest incident comes amid international outrage over the Israeli military’s brutal and murderous repression of non-violent protests along the Gaza border where scores of demonstrating Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks and hundreds injured by IDF soldiers using live ammunition to quell dissent.