Marriage Law Blocking Israeli Citizenship Moves Ahead

By JAMES BENNET / The New York Times

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JERUSALEM — The Israeli parliament voted Thursday 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. Opponents of the law called it 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 one million will be punished,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of parliament. He called the law “blacker than black.”

After occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel began permitting Israelis who married residents of the territories to apply for their spouses in Israel under a program of family unification. Last year, the Israeli government froze any such requests.

Thursday’s parliamentary action, which effectively puts the government’s freeze into law, will lapse after a year if it is not renewed. Yuval Steinitz, a parliamentary leader from Likud, accused the governing Palestinian Authority of encouraging Palestinians to marry Israeli Arabs and move into Israel.

“It’s not a humanitarian case — or not only humanitarian — but a deliberate strategy by the Palestinian Authority to change the demographic balance in Israel in order to destroy us,” he said in a telephone interview.

He said that if, as envisioned by a new peace plan, a Palestinian state is to be created in the West Bank and Gaza, then “Palestinians should be unified there.” Orna Kohn, a staff attorney for Adalah, a legal organization for Arab minority rights in Israel, said her group would petition the courts to overturn the law as violating basic rights.

She noted that it did not apply to non-Palestinian foreign spouses of Israelis, and she said that it was also aimed at Israel’s Arab citizens. “You have an Israeli citizen who is an Arab, and you won’t allow him to live with his spouse?” she said. “If this is not racism then perhaps we need to have a new definition.”

Tensions have been growing between Israel’s Jewish and Arab populations during the course of the conflict with the Palestinians, which began in September 2000. On Thursday, Israeli education authorities shut down an Israeli-Arab day care center in northern Israel that they said was extolling “suicide acts of Palestinians.”

The government did not disclose precise figures of how many Palestinians had become Israeli citizens or residents, or had submitted applications to do so. Israeli officials said that 49 Israelis had been killed in some 20 attacks that to some extent involved Palestinians who had entered Israel through family unification. The vote was 53-25, with one abstention.

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Cite this clipping

"Marriage Law Blocking Israeli Citizenship Moves Ahead," The Ledger, 1 August 2003, p. A7. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2003-024. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2003-024