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I'm surprised nobody is offended by the fact that an Israeli needs a visa for the US in the first place.

I'm Israeli, not sure why this should be offensive :) AFAIK most foreigners need a visa, except for EU and few other nations.

And even within the EU Polish citizens still need visas, it's a massive pain. It's basically because after the fall of communism a lot of Polish people went to US with travel visas and stayed, so when the visa requirement was dropped for all EU countries, Poland was explicitly excluded from that arrangement. So now if I wanted to go to US I would need to apply at an embassy first.

Many EU countries are excluded from the VWP, not just Poland.

Actually, there are 37 countries on the VWP. Quite a few outside the EU.

http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

A bill was recently introduced to add Israel to this program, Visa Waiver for Israel Act. The difficulty seems to be that the language of the law is not the same for Israel as for other countries. There may be potential for different treatment of US citizens: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/16/critics-fea...

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