No explanation, no appeal: Israel revoking entry authorization of foreign activists
Israeli soldiers block the path of international activists in Hebron’s Old City, 22 November 2025
Liam Syed reports in +972 on 18 February 2026:
When Katya* applied for an Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) to return to the occupied West Bank in June 2024, she did not expect Israel to approve it. Twenty years earlier, the long-time Palestinian rights activist had been deported following her arrest by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Bil’in, during one of the weekly demonstrations against the construction of the separation wall.
Katya, a Jewish American who described her experience with the Israeli immigration system in 2005 as “pseudo-legal and Kafkaesque” (it included five weeks in jail waiting for an appeal hearing, which was ultimately set for the day after her visa expired), assumed she would never be allowed to return. Yet when she applied for the ETA — now required of all travelers from visa-exempt countries seeking to enter Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories — her application was granted.
On Nov. 11, 2024, Katya entered the country and returned to the West Bank, where she was immediately struck by the vast expansion of Jewish settlements during the intervening two decades. Three days later, during her first full day of protective presence activism (aiming to document and deter settler violence) in the village of Qusra, soldiers on a routine patrol stopped her and photographed her passport. A week after, she and the three activists who were with her that day received identical emails: “Due to a change of circumstances in your case, the ETA-IL approval for application number [redacted] has been revoked.”
The message offered no explanation for the decision, nor any timeline or avenue for appeal. It meant that once Katya exhausted the 90-day limit of her tourist stay, she would be unable to return for at least two years. Others present who had entered Israel before ETAs became mandatory faced no consequences.
For Katya, the contrast between her ETA revocation and her deportation process 20 years earlier was striking. In 2005, there had at least been a theatrical pretence of due process — hearings, judges, and motions — even if the outcome was largely predetermined. The ETA revocation dispensed with even that performance, reducing the whole process to a single email. The bureaucratic machinery that Katya originally encountered had been streamlined into something more efficient and far more difficult to challenge.