Israel pledges fair treatment for all U.S. travelers in bid for visa-free trips

WASHINGTON —  The Biden administration is allowing Israel to audition for a special status that would enable Israelis to travel to the U.S. without a visa — but only if Israel can prove it will no longer discriminate against Palestinian American travelers.

For more than a decade, Israel has sought membership in the United States’ visa waiver program, a privilege enjoyed by about 40 mostly European countries whose citizens can enter the U.S. without visas.

But restrictions that the Israeli government puts on the movement of Palestinian Americans, including at times refusing to allow them to use the country’s international airport, have meant it could not join the program, U.S. officials say.

On Wednesday, the U.S. government said it and officials from Israel were signing a memorandum of understanding in which Israel would pledge to treat all traveling U.S. citizens equally “without regard to national origin, religion or ethnicity” through all ports of entry, including Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

“Our understanding is that this policy will apply to U.S. citizens, including Palestinian Americans on the Palestinian Population Registry, and that will begin a process in which we will monitor not just their implementation of these policies, but their compliance with these policies and compliance with other facets of the visa waiver program,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

“And by Sept. 30 [the end of the fiscal year], the U.S. government will make a decision on whether they merit admission into the program,” Miller said.

U.S. officials will monitor Israel’s compliance for the next six to eight weeks before Israelis can travel to the U.S. without visas, two other senior administration officials said separately, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity ahead of the formal announcement.

The officials declined to outline in detail how the monitoring would work — whether U.S. agencies would post observers at the airport and other points of entry or try similar methods — but said they were determined to obtain accurate reports on the treatment of U.S. citizens.

“We do have an approach in place whereby we can get information from a variety of sources,” one of the administration officials said. “Our aim is to collect as much information as we can so that we can reach a judgment that is most likely to capture what is actually taking place as opposed to what we’re being told.”

Palestinian Americans have long complained of being discriminated against, abused, subjected to tough questioning and confronted with other obstacles when attempting to travel in Israel, usually when headed to the West Bank or Gaza Strip, or back into Israel from those areas.

The Biden administration officials acknowledged that the Israeli government has known for years what steps it needed to take to win entry into the visa waiver program. This is the first time the Israelis are committing to meeting the requirements at the same time that the visa refusal rate for Israelis dropped to under 3%, another precondition for qualifying for the process, one of the officials said.

“What Israel is pledging to do would represent a significant change in its policy regarding the entry of American citizens,” the official added. “I hope ... that what this is changing [is] how Israel fundamentally treats all American citizens,” especially those with Palestinian or other U.S.-dual nationalities.

The announcement coincided with Israeli President Isaac Herzog‘s official visit to Washington, delivering an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, a day after meeting with President Biden at the White House. He did not mention the visa program in public remarks, but State Department officials said a “breakthrough” on the issue was achieved Tuesday. Reports from Israel say the steps it has agreed to will start Thursday.