Kim Bullimore
On May 15, the Israeli government voted to extend racist amendments to Israel's citizenship laws, preventing the reunification of up to 21,000 Israeli and Palestinian families.
The amendment to the Law of Citizenship and Entry prevents the family reunification between Israeli citizens and Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The Citizenship amendment was "temporarily" enacted in July 2003, following a May 2002 freeze on applications for family reunification between Israeli citizens and Palestinians from the OPT, was due to expire on May 31, 2005.
Palestinians and Arabs with Israeli citizenship currently make up around 20% of the Israeli population, and many of them are married to Palestinians from the OPT. Under the newly extended amendments and other existing Israeli laws, Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens cannot apply for permanent residence in Israel or for Israeli citizenship and Israeli citizens can not enter the Gaza or Area A of the West Bank (areas under full Palestinian Authority). As a result, families are permanently separated due to discriminatory and racist amendments to the Citizenship Law.
According to Hasan Jabarin, from the Adalah Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the amendments to the Citizenship Laws "creates three separate ethnic tracks for citizenship in Israel: a track for Jews, a track for Arabs and a track for "foreigners". Writing in the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, Jabarin noted that the "Arab track" unlike the "Jewish track" restricts family reunification and citizenship on the basis of ethnicity.
According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists, the only exceptions under the new amendments are for Palestinian wives over the age of 25 years and husbands over the age of 35. However, according all three organisations which signed a joint letter to the Israeli Knesset objecting to the extension of the amendments, the age criteria exemptions "are arbitrary and apply only to a small percentage of the couples seeking family reunification".
Israel has tried to justify the implementations of the amendments both in 2003 and in 2005 by citing "security grounds". However, in an April 4 Israeli cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stated that "This law will be guided by demographic considerations meant to ensure a solid Jewish majority for years to come", adding, "there is no need to hide behind security arguments. There is a need for the existence of a Jewish state."
Former prime minister and current Israeli finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the same meeting said "Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel's security and a Jewish majority in Israel".
Israel has long made it difficult for the Palestinian and Arab spouses of Israeli citizens to gain either permanent residency or Israeli citizenship. According to the Israeli Human Rights group B'tselem, Israel began to deny almost all requests for family unification in 1973. In 1993, while Israel did grant partial recognition for the right of family reunification for spouse, it also simultaneously imposed a restrictive policy, which prolonged the separation of couples.
Despite a 1999 Israeli court decision, known as the Stamka ruling, decreeing that anyone marrying an Israeli citizen was entitled to equal treatment in the processing of their application, unless they had a criminal past or were a security risk, Israel has continued to attempt to retain the "Jewish character" of the state and demographic majority of Jews by imposing arduous application and processing procedures for Palestinian, Arab and foreign non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens.
Prior to the implementation of the citizenship amendments it took on average five years from submission of the application to either grant or deny citizenship. If the application was allowed to proceed after this five-year period, the applicant could spend up to another five years in various legal stages before receiving permanent residency or citizenship.
Two other countries in recent times have implemented such blatantly racist laws in relation to citizenship, marriage and freedom of movement. In the 1950s, the state of Virginia in the US forbade miscegenation, mixed marriages of blacks and whites and South Africa under the apartheid regime up until 1980 forbad a black woman the right to live with her husband if he had a permit to live in white area for work purposes.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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