Posted by Dargo Sal on Monday, February 2, 2015
Dorgham Abusalim, a journalist and a member of the Palestinian Delegation to the US, was forced to take almost all of his clothes off before attending an event organized by a non-profit organization at the US Israeli Embassy as part of a program on US foreign policy, according to Monodoweiss.
“After a long wait at the security gate that was not so different from the humiliation Palestinians experience at a check point, I was stripped down to my underwear – an exercise that is repulsive at worst and undiplomatic at best,” he wrote in his column on Monodoweiss.
The man appeared to be the only person out of 40 participants of the briefing who was a Palestinian, and eventually he was the only one to be stripped down.
“I asked [the security guards] if other participants are going through the same process, they said “yes.” When I asked my fellow participants, they were in disbelief. None of them were stripped down to their underwear,” he added.
When the event started, Abusalim noted, the Embassy spokesperson Aaron Sagui, who was hosting the conference, called Israelis and Palestinians “cousins” to underline the close ties between nations. But when Abusalim asked about “humilating” checking procedures, Embassy reprehensive hinted that all of Palestinians may be terrorists.
“He [Aaron Sagui] then went on a recycled diatribe of past experiences with “Palestinian terrorists,” effectively suggesting that I, in his view, am a terrorist,” Dorgham Abusalim wrote.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has resulted in an ongoing standoff between the two nations which unfolded in the middle of the 20th century after the establishment of the state of Israel.
