Keeping US Citizens Out

It was an unseasonably hot March morning last week when Rena Zoldan and her husband arrived at the US embassy in Jerusalem. They had obtained a coveted appointment for an emergency passport for their two-month-old to enable them to travel home to Chicago for Pesach.

“My first baby was born in February 2020, and because of Covid, I had to make Pesach in Israel,” she says. “I was determined that this time, I would be home for Pesach and have a real break. My whole family is flying home, too, because we booked to come.”

But when they tried to enter the embassy, they were told passport rules had changed and, effective that very morning, they needed another document to be eligible for an emergency passport. When Rena tried explaining to the obviously unbothered staffer manning the booth that they had booked this appointment before the rules changed, and that the earliest available appointment for this document was in August, he merely shrugged and told her to come back then.

Estimates of the number of US citizens living in Israel range between 180,000 and 300,000. Most of them have no doubt become accustomed to the lackluster service that now characterizes consular services there, but the chaos that broke out last week represents a new low for the US embassy, which some frustrated Americans describe as a worse bureaucracy than Israel’s notoriously sclerotic Interior Ministry.