13 April 2026

For several years Israel has threatened to block access to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to anyone who has supported BDS, and it is now doing so. What is particularly worrying is that its information about BDS supporters appears to be coming from American law enforcement agencies, according to this report in the Electronic Intifada.

Israel blocks US student protesters from entering West Bank

Carrie Zaremba The Electronic Intifada 3 April 2026

On the morning of 11 February, a delegation of roughly a dozen US citizens arrived at the Allenby crossing, the Israeli-controlled boundary between the occupied West Bank and Jordan.

Traveling as part of an independent transnational exchange with Palestinian students and academics, the delegation’s members intended to meet their Palestinian counterparts, build institutional and organizational partnerships, and witness firsthand the realities of life under Israeli military occupation.

However, the delegation’s full strength would never reach the West Bank. Two members never made it through.

Before they could officially enter the West Bank, they encountered the outer perimeter of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The separation at the boundary followed a racialized logic.

Four young women, all students at prominent US universities, approached the crossing booths in pairs. All four shared nearly identical political backgrounds, including ongoing suspensions from their universities and records of arrests during pro-Palestine campus protests.

Two of the women were white. The other two were women of color – one of Kashmiri descent, the other of Indigenous Bolivian heritage.

Within minutes, the white students were cleared to enter without incident. Their passports were returned without comment.

Meanwhile, their companions’ passports were taken, and they were told simply to sit down.

The students believe their race made them visible as potential “threats” even before their political activity came into play. Such differential treatment has long been reported by travelers entering through Israeli-controlled crossings, where discretionary security procedures allow authorities to single out individuals without explanation.

As Israel is founded on and remains committed to a racist ideology – Zionism – it is not surprising that boundary violence and harassment are used to assert its power and authority. Israel filters the world through its lens of ethnic hierarchy.

While the two students waited, Israeli soldiers walked past casually eating ice cream, laughing with assault rifles slung across their chests.

“They would start looking over at the waiting area where all of these people of color are sitting and just look at us as if it’s a zoo … laughing at us, clearly talking about us,” one of the students said. The student spoke on condition of anonymity.

For three hours, no one talked to the two students. The first contact came when an official approached one of the students and asked whether she had received “the paper” – referring to an administrative form that the Israelis wanted the students to fill out.

She had not, and the official told her he would bring it soon. It was nearly four hours before the Israeli authorities finally brought them in for questioning.

Ideological screening

Since a 2017 amendment to the Entry to Israel Law permitting the denial of entry to supporters of boycott efforts against the state, ideological vetting has become an increasingly normalized aspect of border control.

Activists, journalists, academics and human rights workers have reported being interrogated about their political views, social media activity, and associations with Palestinian individuals and organizations.

In the interrogation room, the Israeli officials began with routine questions: “Why are you here? What is your intention in Israel?

“Are you traveling with the others? What school did you attend? Where is it located?”

When one of the students answered that her university was located in New York City, the tone shifted.

“Did you attend any protests at your school specifically against Israel?” an official asked. “Have you been a part of anything against Israel?”

When she replied “no,” the officials pressed further: “You didn’t go to protests, but your friends went to protests, didn’t they?”

The student denied involvement.

“Why not? Why didn’t you go to the protests?” one of the officials asked.

The student explained that she was focused on earning her degree.

“Well, friends go with friends to protests,” an official insisted. “We don’t believe you.”

At one point, the Israeli interrogators confronted the student with information about her past arrests at campus demonstrations.

“So are you also going to deny it if I tell you that we have proof that you were arrested for protests at your school?” an official asked.

The level of detail suggested access to information beyond what a casual internet search would easily reveal.

Exactly how the Israeli authorities obtained those records is unclear. They may have come from publicly accessible databases, private data brokers, or formal information-sharing channels with US law enforcement.

It is also possible that the authorities did not possess these records at all and that the claims may have just been a psychological tactic meant to intimidate the students into a confession.

Regardless of how much information the Israelis can access, the implication is chilling and indicates the convergence of US state repression and Israeli boundary control. Actions taken on a university campus thousands of miles away had become grounds for exclusion at a foreign checkpoint.

The second student was subjected to a parallel interrogation.

An official asked her why she no longer wore a hijab and questioned her about her job, her school and her social media presence.

“You know people in your group have been arrested,” the official told her.

“It felt like they had already made up their mind,” the student reflected.

Repression across borders

Later, the first student was summoned again.

“So you’re going to tell the truth now, right?” an official said as she escorted the student down the hall.

Inside the room, another official responded: “Did you get your story straight? If you aren’t going to tell us the truth, then you can never come back.”

During this second round of interrogations, an official again brought up the student’s arrest record, saying, “We have your information from the New York criminal justice system, and we trust them way more than we trust you, a stranger trying to get into Israel.”

This episode highlights the increasingly transnational character of political surveillance and repression. Campus activism in the United States has drawn intense scrutiny from university administrations, law enforcement agencies and pro-Israel groups.

The fact that this information surfaced at a foreign boundary crossing illustrates how the boundaries between domestic policing and international security are becoming more porous.

Banned from the West Bank

After hours of questioning, the officials shifted from questioning to processing. The students’ fingerprints and mugshots were taken.

The entire process lasted most of the day.

When the officials took her fingerprints and photos, one of the students couldn’t help but laugh, a visceral reaction to the absurdity of a nuclear-armed state feeling threatened by two young American students.

Eventually, both were informed they would be denied entry to the West Bank and were required to sign documents formalizing their ban from occupied Palestine – which the officials at the Allenby crossing misleadingly described as “Israel.”

“You are not entering Israel today, and you know why,” the students were told.

“In that moment, my heart felt really heavy, and I was so heartbroken,” one of the students said. “I’m not even Palestinian, and that feeling was so strong for me.”

The students must now appeal the decision through an immigration lawyer in order to seek a reversal of the ban.

Unprecedented?

It would appear that this is the first publicly documented case in which US youth have been detained and denied entry to the West Bank for their campus political activity since Israel began its genocidal war against Gaza.

The students interpret their experience as part of a broader strategy aimed at limiting international engagement with Palestinians. By creating uncertainty and risk for visitors, authorities can deter future delegations and reduce the flow of outside witnesses.

“They wanted it to be such a bad experience that we don’t come back,” one of the students commented.

At the same time, the students were quick to contextualize their experience as minor compared with what Palestinians endure. They noted that being detained for a few hours and sent back to Jordan’s capital Amman cannot compare to the systemic carceral violence Palestinians face daily.

For Palestinians, there is no “going home” to escape the checkpoints, the permit regime or the threat of arbitrary administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial.

The students see their treatment as a diluted extension of those practices aimed at quelling Palestinian resistance rather than as an equivalent experience.

An unstable occupation

From the students’ perspective, the incident revealed the sensitivity and instability of the Israeli occupation. A system confident in its legitimacy, they argued, would have little reason to interrogate foreign students in their early twenties about distant campus protests.

Unable to enter the West Bank, the two students remained in Amman and continued participating in the exchange remotely, later traveling to Lebanon to meet partners there. Despite the setback, they say the ordeal strengthened rather than weakened their commitment to the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Neither surveillance nor intimidation has succeeded in extinguishing their belief in the movement.

If anything, the Israeli state’s attempt to bar them from Palestinian land only confirmed the regime’s own profound insecurity.

By using the weight of its border apparatus against two students, the Zionist project signaled its fear of the burgeoning consciousness among young people in the US.

Realizing how desperately it fears the truth they carry, the students assert that their responsibility to organize has only become more urgent. As one of them said, “The only thing to do is to keep fighting.”

Carrie Zaremba is a writer and organizer based in Brooklyn, New York