This past March, 44-year-old Hayan Ju'beh's tourist visa expired, and he had to travel to Amman in order to receive a new one - a routine procedure for him over the last 10 years. "Three to four days and I'll be back," he promised his four children.
On the day of his expected return, his wife, 34-year-old Sawsan Quaoud, took their four children to a mall at El Bireh. The kids played games and she sat and watched them, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. It was then that she received a call from her husband.
The authorities didn't allow him to pass through the Allenby border crossing, he told her.
<snip>
In December 1995 the Ministry of Interior began implementing a systematic policy of revoking the Jerusalem residency status of thousands of Palestinians who were born in the city, but for whom, according to the ministry, Jerusalem was no longer "the center of their lives" -
and therefore their permanent residency permit had "expired."
This applied to all those who lived abroad in the past or at that time, as well as those Palestinians who lived in neighborhoods just outside Jerusalem's municipal boundary. There was no official declaration of this policy. It only manifested itself as such when an increasing number of people discovered at the border crossings or at the offices of the Ministry of Interior that they were no longer defined as residents, and not as Jerusalemites, and were being stripped of rights in their own town.
<snip>
At the MBC office he met Sawsan Quaoud, a Nablus native and a Ramallah resident. In 1997 they married, and settled in Ramallah. In 1999 they established a television film production company; they also had two children. When they lost all hope of Ju'beh regaining his Jerusalem residency, they asked the Israeli authorities (through the Palestinian Ministry of Interior) for "family reunification" in Ramallah.
That is, they asked Israel to allow him to become a resident of the Palestinian Authority.
Israel did not do so; indeed, in all such cases since September 2000, has put the applications on indefinite hold.
<snip>
Ju'beh decided not to act illegally, as some people do, by remaining in the country after his visa expired, to fight for his right to stay "from the inside." That would have turned him into a prisoner in Ramallah. Indeed when traveling to work outside the city, at every checkpoint in the area, a soldier could have discovered his "crime" and would have the authority to deport him.
<snip>
"We surrendered," admitted Quaoud, on the eve of her forced departure to Britain.
The Israeli authorities that revoked Ju'beh's residency of his native Jerusalem did not allow reunification with his wife in Ramallah, and finally also decided that even as a tourist, he does not have the right to live in his homeland.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/755375.html
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