Press TV has interviewed a pro-Palestine activist who was detained by Israel for four days after being denied entry into the occupied territories.


The following is a transcript of the interview with Green Party activist Anne Gray.

Press TV: Arriving by plane as civilians from Britain, what was your treatment like when you arrived in Tel Aviv?

Gray: We had no real opportunity to explain why we had come. We had no opportunity to assure the border officials that we were peaceful people engaged in a process of cultural and political dialog. The purpose of our visit was to assert the right of Palestinians to be visited. The right of Palestinian organizations to receive delegations like this for the purpose of discussion, volunteering, solidarity and the exercise of all the normal rights to non-violent activity, which we would expect in a democratic state.

Instead, we were taken straight from the passport control points after really no effective questioning at all, and put into a waiting room, which in Kafkaesque fashion turned into an airport-based detention center in a matter of hours. There was hardly any water to drink for two and a half or three hours. Then it was jail for four days before we were flown home.

Press TV: If Israel is stopping you visiting without effective questioning, why would they just put you in prison?

Gray: They had some notion or they pretended to the world that they had some notion that we were going to disrupt the airport. That was definitely not our intention. We did not intend to demonstrate inside the airport. We did not intend to disrupt airport procedures. We wanted to get through passport control, reclaim our baggage and go on our buses to Bethlehem like perfectly normal visitors. That was our objective.

Press TV: What happened when you were taken to prison?

Gray: We were six to a cell. The cells were pretty dirty when we arrived. We pleaded to make phone calls; we did not get that for three days. We were basically given no explanation whatsoever for our detention. We were not even given the right, displayed on a notice on the wall, detainees in this kind of detention center should have. We were not allowed to keep our mobile phones with us. We were not allowed to have money with us. We had probably two or three hours in an exercise yard during the whole of that period. We were locked into cells. We were not even allowed to move around the corridor for sixteen or seventeen hours each day.

Press TV: Did you get to meet any of the Palestinian prisoners there?

Gray: We were completely separated from the other detainees.

Press TV: The airline companies that stopped other people flying in from France, Belgium and Switzerland and America were told that you were undesirables. Please define the undesirables on this trip.

Gray: I would say the average age was well over fifty. On our flight there was one academic still working, two retired academics, two Christian ministers, a community worker and a teacher from Scotland. The people were all middle-aged respectable grand-mother-age-group sort of people. It was an absurd idea that we were undesirable or disruptive or -- as Netanyahu said -- "hooligans."

Press TV: You failed to reach the Palestinians who wanted to meet you. Do you feel dented and disheartened by what has happened?

Gray: I think the people we should feel most sorry for are the Palestinians who suffer this oppression hour by hour, day by day and year by year. When I was in Palestine on my last trip in 2009, it was clear that maybe one in five or one in six of the families amongst the community where I was working had suffered arrest or beating at the hands of the Israeli state. This is no form of democracy. This is outrageous.

We basically need to assert the right of Palestinians to have a normal life and not be treated as though they were themselves in some giant prison; a prison where they do not have a right to peaceful demonstration and peaceful protest, which is often attacked with rubber bullets, tear gas and even live fire. People are being injured and a few killed all the time just for walking down the street. I spent some time last year after my last visit raising money for a lad who was shot in head three times with plastic bullets at very close range on a non-violent demonstration against the siege of Gaza.

Press TV: The racism of the arrests and the way people are treated at the points of entry into the Palestinian occupied territories is well-known to activists. Can you describe any plucking out of people for their skin color or religion you might have experienced?

Gray: On this trip it was noticeable that the young French passport holders of apparently North African origin got considerably worse treatment than the older European-descent people. There was a young Algerian woman -- I call her Algerian although she was probably born in France -- who was shackled hand and foot when being taken from the airport to the police van which then took us to the jail. They threw her into that van rather like a parcel, she described later. She ended up with lacerations on her hands and wrists and quite severe bruising, and there were quite few others who were roughly treated in the same way. There was obviously discrimination going on within our group between those who appeared to be of Arab origin and European origin.

Press TV: Would you like to try to reach Palestine again?

Gray: I would love to go again. I would love to do the kind of things I did in 2009, but I have no idea of the consequences of this "entry denied" stamp in my passport. I do not know if I will be able to go there again, but I am determined to help the Palestinian people in whatever way I can from where I am -- which is Britain.

Press TV: What do you think of the effects of activists being stopped from having connections with those in the West Bank?

Gray: There have been UN reports that aid work and human rights work are severely jeopardized by the restrictions on movement both within Palestine and to Palestine and, for that matter, from Palestine. I met some Palestinian friends in Europe last year. A friend of a friend was then trying to come to London to study English. He was denied a visa to come to London for a month. I think there is a kind of conspiracy to prevent people from traveling whatever their nature. I mean a forty-odd-year-old bank official is surely not a dangerous character; why can he not have a visa to go to London?