Israel
Imposes 'Racist' Marriage Law
By
Justin Huggler
Independent,
UK
01 August 2003
Israel's
Parliament has passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis
from living in Israel. The move was denounced by human rights organisations
as racist, undemocratic and discriminatory.
Under the new law,
rushed through yesterday, Palestinians alone will be excluded from obtaining
citizenship or residency. Anyone else who marries an Israeli will be
entitled to Israeli citizenship.
Now Israeli Arabs
who marry Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip will either
have to move to the occupied territories, or live apart from their husband
or wife. Their children will be affected too: from the age of 12 they
will be denied citizenship or residency and forced to move out of Israel.
Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch sent a joint letter to the Knesset, Israel's
parliament, urging members to reject the bill. "The draft law barring
family reunification for Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens is
profoundly discriminatory," Amnesty said in a statement. "A
law permitting such blatant racial discrimination, on grounds of ethnicity
or nationality, would clearly violate international human rights law
and treaties which Israel has ratified and pledged to uphold."
B'Tselem, an Israeli
human rights organisation, joined in the criticism of the law. Yael
Stein, a spokesman, said: "This is a racist law that decides who
can live here according to racist criteria."
Some Israelis believe
they are sitting on a demographic time bomb, with an Israeli Arab community,
already 20 per cent of the population, growing faster than the Jewish
population.
The discrimination
is not only against Palestinians, according to human rights groups,
but against Israel's own 1.2 million citizens of Palestinian origin
as well. The overwhelming majority of Israelis who marry Palestinians
are the so-called Israeli Arabs - Palestinians who live in Israel and
have Israeli citizenship.
"This bill
blatantly discriminates against Israelis of Palestinian origin and their
Palestinian spouses," said Hanny Megally of Human Rights Watch.
"It's scandalous that the Government has presented this bill, and
it's shocking that the Knesset is rushing it through."
The government pushed
the vote through at speed, even agreeing to consider it a vote of confidence
to get it through. It was passed by 53 votes to 25, with one abstention.
Gideon Ezra, a cabinet
minister, said: "This law comes to address a security issue. Since
September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks,
between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs."
Since 1993, more
than 100,000 Palestinians have become Israeli citizens through marriage,
Mr Ezra said. But B'Tselem pointed out that only 20 of those 100,000
have been involved in suicide bombings or other militant attacks. Human
rights groups said security concerns could not justify the new law,
which amounts to collective punishment. Noam Hoffstater, another spokesman
for B'Tselem, said: "Those who voted for the bill and those who
support it are making a very cynical use of security arguments to justify
it, even though they used no data. This in fact was a cover for the
real reason, which is the racist reason, the demographic reason."
Many on Israel's
right fear that it will be impossible to maintain Israel's identity
as an officially Jewish state if the Arab sector becomes too large.
"Today I lost
hope," Sa'id abu Muammar, an Israeli Arab, told Reuters news agency.
He has been hiding his Palestinian wife from the police since their
marriage a year ago. "This is what we've been doing and this is
probably what we will have to continue to do."