Pittsburgh Post-Gazette · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · 1 August 2003

CP-2003-023

Israel blocks Palestinian spouses’ residency

By James Bennet / The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — The Israeli parliament yesterday voted to block Palestinians who marry Israelis from becoming Israeli citizens or residents, erecting a new legal barrier as Israel finished the first section of a new physical barrier against West Bank Palestinians. Supporters of the legislation called it a necessary bulwark against infiltration by terrorists.

“We are in a state of war — not with the English, or the Americans, or the Dutch, or the Slovaks — we are at war with our neighbors, the Palestinians,” Gideon Sa’ar, of the dominant Likud Party, told the parliament in debate before the vote. “It’s a tragic reality.”

Proponents also called the law a way to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority. Foes called the law a racist measure that threatened to divide thousands of families or force them out of Israel. Roughly 1.2 million of Israel’s 6.7 million citizens are Arabs, and they are far more likely than Israeli Jews to marry Palestinians.

“It cannot be that, because of the actions of one or 10 or 20, that a population of 1 million will be punished,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of parliament. He called the law “blacker than black.” The vote was 53-25, with one abstention.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, folio or printed date appears on this clipping — it is a single trimmed column beginning at the headline. The lead says the parliament voted “yesterday”; the Knesset vote was taken Thursday, July 31, 2003, which is consistent with a Friday, Aug. 1 paper. Nothing on the clipping names the newspaper.

Cite this clipping

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Marriage Law Blocking Israeli Citizenship Moves AheadThe Ledger1 August 2003CP-2003-024

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.