Israel
One More Step Into Open Apartheid
By Ali Abunimah
Electronic Intifada
June 28, 2003
A law forbidding Israeli
citizenship for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who marry
Israelis passed its first reading in the Knesset on June 18. This is
another milestone on Israel's road to open, institutionalized apartheid.
According to Ha'aretz, the
bill forbids the granting of Israeli citizenship in cases of reunification
between families split between Israel and the Occupied Territories and
will strictly limit the ability of Palestinians to obtain Israeli residence
or to legally remain within the country.
Such laws targeted at a specific
ethnic community are an odious violation of all international human
rights norms.
Jewish-Israeli Knesset member
Zehava Gal-On called the bill "racist and discriminatory."
Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Wasil Taha compared it to Germany's
1930s Nuremberg laws which targeted Jews and limited their civil rights,
including the right to marriage. The Israeli bill is also reminiscent
of apartheid-era South African laws which banned interracial marriages.
And, until the Supreme Court overturned them, the United States had
a long tradition of laws, specifically restricting Africans, Chinese
and Japanese from obtaining citizenship, owning land or marrying whites.
Israel has also used zoning
regulations, land seizures, and the quasi-official Jewish National Fund
(which controls expropriated Palestinian land and leases it exclusively
to Jews) to achieve essentially the same purposes as apartheid South
Africa's Group Areas Act -- ensuring that the privileged and exploited
populations live in separate and unequal communities.
Marriages between Jews and
non-Jews are not allowed in Israel, because like a number of other countries
in the region, it does not recognize civil marriages. All such marriages
must be conducted outside the country. The new marriage laws making
their way through the Knesset mainly seem to be aimed at preventing
marriages between Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship and Palestinians
who live in the Occupied Territories.
The new law would force Palestinian
citizens of Israel who want to live with spouses or family members from
the Occupied Territories to move to the Occupied Territories, or at
least prevent them from bringing their new spouses into Israel. This
is in line with the views of several Israeli ministers, that Palestinian
citizens of Israel should be given 'incentives' to abandon their homeland.
The proposed law will give
the Israeli interior minister the authority to grant citizenship or
residency to a Palestinian if the minister is convinced that the individual
identifies with Israel and its goals. In other words, only Palestinians
who convince Israel that they are committed Zionists need apply.
A further amendment to Israel's
citizenship law, proposed by Ariel Sharon himself, and endorsed by Israel's
top legal officer, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, would prevent
the automatic granting of citizenship to children with one parent from
the Occupied Territories. This measure will not only deprive Palestinian
citizens of Israel of the right to pass on their civil and political
rights to their children, but is aimed at limiting the growth in the
number of Israel's Palestinian citizens.
Taken together, these measures
aim at a quiet population "transfer."
But even if successful in
Israeli terms, this law will only reduce the number of Palestinians
in Israel's account and increase the number of disenfranchised Palestinians
living in the Occupied Territories with no civil or political rights
and no citizenship in any state. This can only hasten the arrival of
the day when a Jewish minority is ruling over a Palestinian majority
between the river and the sea.
Israeli interior minister
Avraham Poraz, who introduced the bill, naturally claims that the motivation
is not racism or a desire to preserve Israel's Jewish supremacy, but
as usual, security. According to Ha'aretz, Poraz justifies the bill
on the grounds that since the beginning of the Intifada, "there
has been increasing involvement in violent acts on the part of Palestinian
residents of the [Occupied] Territories holding Israeli identity cards."
Earlier this year, Israel stripped citizenship from two Palestinian-Israelis
on the grounds that they were "terrorists." But such justifications
are as old as racism itself and do not deserve to be answered.
Israel has never considered
stripping those it defines as Jews of their citizenship for any crime,
even the high treason of murdering the prime minister. In fact, Yigal
Amir, the convicted killer of Yitzhak Rabin was able to vote in the
last Israeli election from his prison cell. Yet now, Israel proposes
to further strip away the rights of an entire community who happen to
be the indigenous people of the country. The raw racism could not be
more evident.
In an atmosphere where ethnic
cleansing is openly advocated by Israeli cabinet ministers as a "solution"
to the conflict, the passage of this repulsive new bill is hardly surprising.
What is worrying is that where Israel is concerned such practices are
considered unworthy of comment by the United States, or the European
Union, who continue to hope that a flawed road map can lead to peace,
while with walls, bulldozers and racist laws Israel is building apartheid
on the ground.
(This article first appeared
in The Daily Star: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/26_06_03_d.asp)