Yahya Dbouk*

For months, Israel has been witnessing an unprecedented and insufficiently foreseen crisis, with settlers queueing for long periods to obtain their passports. A crisis that has become a great burden on the Israelis, disrupting their routine of life, and hindering one of the easy services in normal countries. Such crisis has recently exacerbated, with a black market emerging for the Israelis to buy a “turn” at passport offices for hundreds of dollars.

Although the Israeli authorities have tried, in the last two years in particular – and it should be noted that this phenomenon is not new – to propose temporary solutions, by hiring new passport offices, these measures failed to put an end to this dilemma, which continues to expand, leaving queues of up to 2.5 million in the various offices of the Israeli so-called “Population and Immigration Authority”.

New Passport Plan

Since the formation of the current government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, more than three months ago, the new Interior Minister, Moshe Arbel, rolled up his sleeves to set up an ambitious three-stage plan aimed at gradually handling the passport problem. The plan provides for the opening of four large centers as well as working on issuing 600,000 passports during the coming summer months, and the same number in the coming fall and winter. The Israelis were also promised that the online applications and prior appointments would be cancelled.

Although this plan was described as “ambitious”, the Israelis do not expect, according to polls, it would do more than its predecessors that were presented in the last three years, blaming political instability, the difficulty of rapid recruitment of personnel and leadership overreach, as well as complex moves and slow decisions in the government.

Chaos in Passport Offices

According to a report published in the Hebrew-language newspaper “Globes” on the 20th of April, until that date, “appointments to register for passport applications in Beersheba and Haifa are only available after six months, while in Tel Aviv, even a single waiting list is not available.”

The newspaper noted that «this problem is not new,” adding that “former interior minister Ayelet Shaked tried in February 2022 to find solutions to it, promising a solution within weeks, but the weeks passed without this promise being fulfilled.”

Indeed, the crisis produced a parallel market, in which appointments are bought and sold, while “organizations” aiming to “facilitate” obtaining an early appointment, for a price, of course.

For its part, Haaretz newspaper explained in a March 14 report that waiting lists differ from one Israeli city to another, pointing out that the first appointment on a waiting list in Nazareth is nine months away, while in Arad (Negev) is available after six months, and in Tiberias after five months.

The newspaper indicated that the current crisis is “a continuation of the great failure of the Population and Immigration Authority,” adding that what causes most distress in the Zionist entity now is the chaos at the passport offices. The daily reported some cases where some Israelis – who waited for months to apply for a passport and chose offices that were far from their residences – found out that their appointments no longer existed after somebody contacted the office and cancelled the appointments. Haaretz also reported that there have been some social media accounts, specifically on Telegram, which sell the appointment for hundreds of dollars.

Later on May 1, Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Eyal Siso, the director of the Israeli Interior Ministry’s Population Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA), has acknowledged that PIBA is to blame over the passport crisis, pledging to intensify work to address it. In this regard, the official called on the Israelis to “be patient”.

The newspaper noted, meanwhile, that “registration for an appointment to renew a passport or an identity card has become almost impossible, as it takes months to be finalized.”

“Digitalization has not been introduced to many government websites yet, especially to the Ministry of Interior and its departments.”

Interior Ministry’s Narrative

On the other hand, what is the Israeli Interior Ministry’s narrative of the crisis’ causes? In 2020, with the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, most countries across the world, including ‘Israel’, imposed restrictions on border crossings. According to data from the International Civil Aviation Organization, the number of passengers on air flights in the world decreased from 4.5 billion in 2019 to 1.8 billion in 2020.

In ‘Israel’, according to a report by the Population and Immigration Authority, the number of passengers decreased from 9.2 million in 2019, to 1.5 million in 2020, which prompts the Israeli authority to significantly reduce its activities, including issuing passports.

According to the authority’s data (Globes, the first of February), the volume of demand for passports in 2019 reached 1.08 million passports, while it decreased in 2020 to only 430,000, and it rose again in 2021 and reached 710,000 with the number of passengers reaching 3 million. As for the year 2022, the number of passengers reached 8.4 million, and the demand for passports reached 1.34 million, while requests in the first months of this year amounted to 2.5 million.

But do these figures justify the current exacerbation of the crisis? And how can we explain the doubled, or even the tripled, number of passport seekers in the post-covid era?

“Shortage of Employees”

Nearly two months ago, the Knesset Interior Committee discussed the dilemma of delayed passports. The committee received data from the relevant authorities stating that “179 days is the average time the Israeli passport seekers have to wait to get a turn on a waiting list in the Tel Aviv and Gush Dan areas, while in the north, the average period is 132 days,” Israeli Channel 14 reported on April 4.

The report noted that these authorities attributed “this disturbing phenomenon to many burdens and shortage of manpower and employees.”

Also in the report, the Israeli channel’s correspondent confirmed what Israelis have been circulating. The reporter obtained a video showing a group of people – speaking Russian – holding waiting lists to sell, and some of them asking buyers to contact their Telegram channel for pricing.

The Israeli reporter said one of the Telegram accounts “has thousands of subscribers, and whoever wants to buy a turn must give up large sums,” according to Channel 14 report, which also quoted an employee in secondary education as saying: “I contacted the person in charge of the group to get two appointments, he asked me for 500 dollars.”

* Yahya Dbouk is a Lebanese columinist at Al-Akhbar newspaper. He wrote this article on May 6, 2023.

Source: Al-Akhabr Newspaper (translated and edited by Al-Manar English staff)