This condition was extremely difficult to satisfy, given the complete freeze on visitor permits, introduced with the outbreak of the Second Intifada and which shows no signs of being eased. Though the family life of the Palestinian population has come to be used by Israel as a political bargaining chip and a means to put political pressure on the Palestinian Authority, its wider impact is to make life so difficult for Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza Strip that many feel they have little option but to abandon their ancestral homeland. Interview with Adnan, Beit Sahour82 I was born in Germany 32 years ago to Palestinian parents. My father moved from Palestine to Germany in the late 1950s searching for work, but as he was not present in the West Bank during the occupation in 1967 and had not been counted in the population census, he was prevented from obtaining a Palestinian National number or ID card. In 1968, my parents married and my mother joined my father in Germany. Unlike my father she used to have a Palestinian ID card, but a few years later while she was on her way to visit the family in Palestine she was informed by the Israeli border control that her Palestinian ID card was revoked, because she had left the country for too long. As a result both of my parents were deprived of residency rights in their own homeland. Instead they applied for German citizenship. In the early 1970s, my parents came back to their hometown of Beit Sahour on a tourist visa and applied for family reunification in order to be able to stay and live there, but their application was rejected by Israel and they returned to Germany. When I was born in 1982, my parents attempted to settle in Palestine again. They applied for family reunification for a second time. This time, surprisingly, my mother and my older sister were granted the Palestinian ID, but the rest of the family was refused. However, after living in Palestine for about one year, my parents decided that it was impossible to continue our life in Palestine without residency rights for the whole family and we went back to Germany. Still, almost every summer my parents used to take us for vacation in Palestine. Consequently we developed close relationships toward our family there and these warm relationships came to feel, over the years, as if we had created a parallel life. For my parents, it was vital to come here, to ensure that their children will have relations with family and, mostly, they wanted us to speak Arabic, in which they succeeded. During my studies in Germany, I met my wife to be, and our relationship became stronger with time, as well as the idea of living in Palestine. In 2008, we got married – a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem and after two years of marriage, in September 2010, we decided to settle there. In 2011 we had our first son. Since we moved to live in Palestine, I have been denied family unification rights and consequently face many obstacles on a daily basis. After a year of marriage I applied for family unification at the District Coordinating Office of Bethlehem and I am yet to receive any official response or update concerning my application. 82 Adnan Qaisi (32), Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, interview by BADIL, August 2013. 33