Israel imposes 'racist' marriage law Palestinian-Israeli couples will be forced to leave or live apart By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem 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."
"Since 1993, more than 100,000 Palestinians have become Israeli citizens through marriage" How many Israelis have become Palestinians through marriage? Probably 0. And if they did, they would be murdered by a bloodthirsty mob of terrorist thugs. That's racism. Come on, how can you say they are racist when they are obviously just preserving their state?
Khan, you continue to crack me up. Have you ever imagined what would happen to an Israeli Jewish Man who married a "Palestinian" Muslim woman and lived with her on the West Bank?? He would more than likely have his throat cut and his body strung up from a telephone pole. And that's if he was lucky. Yes this is the "Democracy" we support, because the "Palestinians" know of no democracy. They only know murder.
So this is what we support. This is what we pay price after terrible price to hold up the State of Israel against it's enemies. This is what we've reaped after being the driving force to preserve it's independence with our billions in arms and aid for almost 50 years. This is what painting a target on our American chest for all the disparate terrorist groups who hold both the Israeli people and their own people in terror from their actions and subsequent Israeli reactions... a racist Israeli government acting outside of the norms of decency. A government captured by an extreme religious right that is dangerous to it's people, disgusting and audacious. It's not the Israeli people who are extreme... it's not the Palestinian and Muslim world who are extreme... it is the small cabals of extremists who have made their way into power and now have their people wondering what they have wrought with their inattention. They better wake up. If the Bush Administration recalls our ambassador to Israel, suspends aid to the Israeli government and denounces this action on the floor of the Security Council... forces a reversal of this blatant racist act, then I will be the first to applaud it. We cannot support a government that is so directly opposed to all America is supposed to stand for. This is not about the Israeli people... this is about their government and our reaction to what I consider the straw that broke the camel's back. React the way America SHOULD react... stun the Israeli extremists with our wrath. Show the world what we really stand for. Bush, the world and America is waiting.
It should be interesting to see how this story is covered up in the US press. Let's see who can first see the story in a mainstream newspaper? Also interesting to see how the knee jerk supporters of Israel jump to the defense even of this hideous racism. I've got news , guys. You can support Jewishness and even the state of Israel without supporting racism. I know the Jews and the Palestinians are the same "race". So let's describe it as ethnic or religious discrimination of the most blatant kind. Come on, how can you say they are racist when they are obviously just preserving their state? That's how you preserve a state based on "racism". This law is a form of ethnic cleansing or an attempt to keep the ethnicity "pure" within the state..
Deckard, that was very well put, if I may say so. I think factions in the Israeli and Palestinian power groups have done countless terrible things (this being the most recent of them). But to reflect that completely on the Israeli and Palestinian people is a horrible wrong. We can maintain our support of the Israeli people and denounce this law at the same time. That's not inconsistent...
I don't give a damn what the Palestinian's do. My tax dollars are not sending billions to them annually and outfitting them with the most powerful weapons in the world including nuclear weapons like they are for the Israeli's. We financially hold up their economy. Imagine in the history of time if there was a country that was funded solely by another. I would prefer that money be spent on tax breaks, or on our educational system versus a HANDOUT to another country.
The Palestinians don't even have a real state, so I don't know if it much matters if you can have citizenship or residency through marriage. Even so, this isn't about the ability to gain citizenship, it is about this ability being denied on racist grounds. An American or a Venezualan or a Nigerian who marries an Israeli can be a resident, but a Palestinian cannot? This is really indefensible. RMT, we may well have Jewish men hanging from telephone polls in the West Bank, because he won't be able to live with his wife in Israel proper. By rejecting the spouses and children of their citizenry, they reject the citizens themselves. It is tantamount to saying, "You are not allowed to marry a Palestinian. If you do, we will disown you." The more I think of it, the more disgusted I get.
I was interested to see what the major outlets said about this, as glynch suggested. I didn't find a mention at cnn.com, though I was surprised to see this article http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/07/29/israel.black.hebrews.ap/index.html about American black vegan polygamists who came to Israel in 1969 being granted permanent resident status. I couldn't find it on abcnews.com either. I did find an article buried in the Chronicle, where it shares space with news on more settlements being built and the construction of the wall to keep Palestinians out. MSNBC.com didn't have a mention of it, though they did have an article http://www.msnbc.com/news/801833.asp on Colin Powell's condemnation of the wall the Israelis are building. The only solid treatment I've yet to see was an NPR story yesterday.
Americans, Nigerians, and Venezualans do not blow up school busses and pizzarias. I personally do not agree with this move, because an Israeli citizen is not likely to marry a terrorist, so they are targeting the wrong people. We need to learn that sometimes what we term discriminatory is actually just being observent and logical. It is rediculous to search Al Gore at the airport, and it is rediculous to suggest that Israel should not have special security policies focused on the Palestinians. Usually it is wrong to take race into consideration, and sometimes it is downright dangerous (remember the sniper case?), but you have to use common sense and treat people with courtesy and respect, not let political correctness run rampant and force you into idiocy.
Come on, do not deny the reality of Palestinian hatred and racism just because they do not have an official state. If an Israeli married a Palestinian and they moved to Palestinian areas, the Jew would be destroyed, it's that simple. Whether the Israeli signs official papers to become a Palestinian citizen is beside the point. It is defensible, for this simple reason- Israel is trying to preserve itself, and that takes controlling immigration. If you would at least acknowledge Israel's point of view, then your outrage would be more convincing.
Well the KKK would agree with you that we should perserve ourself by not allowing any Latinos, Africans, Asians or anyone besides western Europeans in the USA, because it has to preserve itself. Racism has little justification. And like i've said a thousand times, it doesn't matter what the Palestinians do. We're not financially propping up their regime and giving them one of the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world.
If an Israeli married a Palestinian and they moved to Palestinian areas, the Jew would be destroyed, Mr. Clutch I think you are very wrong. Can you offer some proof? I think the Palestinians would be happy to see a friendly Jewish person. Sorry to challenge your assumption. Looking at similar cases. Although blacks were not welcomed in white 1950's Alabama, tolerant whites were tolerated in black Alabama neighborhoods.
Yahoo and Reuters's isn't quite mainstream US press,but it is getting close. ************ .S. to check new citizenship law for discrimination By Gideon Alon, Haaretz Correspondent, and Reuters The United States said Friday it would study an Israeli citizenship law before deciding whether it discriminates against Palestinians by denying them citizenship or residence if they marry Israelis. The Knesset on Thursday approved the second and third readings of the bill, which singles out Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Under Israeli law, other non-Israelis are eligible for citizenship or permanent residence when they marry Israelis. The bill, an amendment to a clause in the citizenship law relating to family unification and which has been widely denounced as "racist" and "inhumane," passed by a 53 to 25 vote, with one abstention - Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev. "We will have to look at that very closely," U.S. State Department Richard Boucher told a briefing Friday. "We certainly oppose any laws that discriminate against individuals for ethnicity, or race or sex, disability and we will have to look carefully at this law and see how it fits under the standard views that we have on this," he added. The right-wing politicians who sponsored the bill said the legislation was an essential tool in the war against Palestinian militants who have killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide attacks during the past 33 months of violence. But human rights groups plan to petition the Supreme Court to overturn the law, which they contend violates the country's unofficial constitution protecting "human dignity and liberty," as well as the international conventions Israel has signed. Hey do you think the State Department might come out against this? Doesn't look like it has passed yet.
Apparently the discrimination against Palestinians is getting worse as the Sharon gang proposes another "racist" law that in this case i s another important example of how they propose to discriminate against Arabs who are citizens of Israel. . ************ Background / 'Jews-only' law sparks firestorm By Bradley Burston, Ha'aretz Correspondent A proposed law that would allow Jews to bar Arabs from buying homes in their communities could expose Israel to a fresh wave of condemnation recalling the now-rescinded UN resolution equating Zionism and racism, critics of the bill said Wednesday. In a decision that set off a storm of debate, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet Sunday voted to endorse a bill that would allow areas within Israel which have been designated as state land to be devoted to residential use by Jews alone. The bill still faces considerable legislative hurdles before it can be passed into law. Although worded in the gray phraseology of legislative practice, the measure goes to the heart of a crucial dichotomy of modern Israel: how to maintain a pluralistic state that is at once formally Jewish in character and genuinely democratic in practice. "If we are not already totally an apartheid state, we are getting much, much closer to it," said former cabinet minister and leftist Meretz party founder Shulamit Aloni. "We are also moving farther and farther away from the founding document of the state of Israel," she said, in a reference to the nation's 1948 Declaration of Independence, which pledged "development of the country for the benefit of all its residents" and "complete social and political equality to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender." The bill was prompted by a landmark Supreme Court ruling over the efforts of the northern Israel Jewish village of Katzir to bar an Israel Arab from buying a house there. Although defined as a "community settlement", without the complex communal interrelationships of kibbutzim and moshavim, Katzir residents voted to keep Israeli Arab Adel Ka'adan from buying a plot and building a house there. After years of legal wrangling, the court in March, 2000, accepted Ka'adan's argument that the policy of the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body which adminsters state lands for many Jewish villages, discriminated against Arab citizens and was therefore illegal. Sponsored by National Religious Party MK Haim Druckman, critics said the proposed law was designed to bypass the court decision, formalizing descimination on Israel's lawbooks. Education Minister Limon Livnat, who spearheaded the cabinet decision to ratify the bill, said the purpose of the measure was to clarify de facto policies in founding specifically Jewish communities within the nation. "This does not stem at all from discrimination, rather from the main basis of Zionism - the return of the Jewish people to its land." Livnat dismissed suggestions that the bill was anti-democratic, saying that each sector in israel should be allowed to live among its own. Moreover, she said, "All of us were raised on the same Zionist values, according to which, the state of Israel may, from the standpoint of national security - the wider view of security, not necessarily of concrete security ... foster the value of a Galilee with a Jewish majority." But cabinet minister Dan Meridor, a conspicuous dissenter as the cabinet endorsed the bill by a wide margin, denounced the proposed law as "a grave error" and "flagrantly discriminatory". "It is not permissible to allow an Israeli law to state that a non-Jew may be prevented from living in a particular place for security reasons," Meridor said. "This is not a security matter at all. There is no need for flagrant discrimination." Indeed, he said, by contrast to discrimination that Jews have experienced in the Diaspora, the Jewish state legally does not discriminate against non-Jews. "As to the charges that Zionism is racism - what are we ourselves saying here?" In one of the darkest moments of Israeli diplomacy, the United Nations passed a resolution in 1975 declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Despite strenuous lobbying efforts by Israel, the resolution remained on the books until the Gulf War and the subsequent Madrid Middle East peace conference led the world body to rescind the Zionism is racism measure in December, 1991. Over the past two years, however, the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, coupled with open warfare betwen the sides, have revived Arab-led denunciations of Israel as a state that practices racism akin to South Africa's long-repealed apartheid regulations that overtly favored whites over blacks and people of mixed race. Aloni, an attorney, said Israel had already put segregation into effect in a number of ways, among them in appropriating Arab-owned land, designating it as "state land," and earmarking it for use by specifically Jewish towns and villages. She angrily dismissed suggestions that the law was an outgrowth of Israeli-Arab rioting at the outset of the current Palestinian uprising. "If you see this as a life-and-death matter, that means that the state of Israel views its Arab citizens as the enemy." "Perhaps we should turn every Israeli Arab village into a detention camp, like we do in the occupied territories, so that Druckman and the rest of the messianics could take away their land as well," Aloni said. "By the right of our might, we are acting as a racist nation. South Africa, as well, was white and democratic. But that was not the intention here." The debate over the law split Ariel Sharon's ruling Likud party, with Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, in the past a relative moderate on such issues, left sitting firmly on the fence. "Legislation such as this has international repercussions that are not good for the state of Israel," said Sheetrit, who abstained in the Sunday cabinet vote. "I don't think that this must be made into law. I don't believe that you should make a law that specifies that one discriminates against someone from the standpoint of his rights in the state of Israel. On the other hand, I can certainly understand that there are population groups in Israel who wish to live apart, particularly community settlements, like Bedouin, Arab, Jewish, Christian or any other category for that matter." Asked why he refrained from voting against the proposed law, Sheetrit said, "There is a central question on this point - Is there a conflict between the values of a Jewish state and of a democratic state? If such a conflict does exist, it must be reduced to the minimum. "We must reach an understanding, but not by means of laws or Supreme Court appeals to force people to accept into their midst people who will spur disputes and trouble within the community ... But if there's no problem, there's no reason not to let them live there, whether Jew, (Muslim) Arab, or Christian." As the debate over the proposed law intensified, Livnat said she viewed the decision as "a very great victory for those who view Israel as a democratic Jewish state as opposed as those who see it as the nation of all its citizens. There is no racism in this." Livnat bristled when an interviewer on state-owned Israel Radio went further, drawing a parallel to anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany. "When the Jews came here after the World War Two Nazi Holocaust, perhaps it would not have been expected that Jews would do something like this to Arabs," the interviewer said. "Any comparison of this type is totally unacceptable," Livnat replied. "Are we exterminating a people? Are we killing people, or forcing them into concentration camps? How can anyone make such a comparison?" Hopefully the US government can start putting pressure to stop discrimination in Israel.
Well, the truth is the USA does try to control immigration. If we were at war with Mexico, and the population of Mexicans in the US threatened to become the majority, what do you think a sensible response for the US government would be? How many immigrants to Sweden can become citizens? Are they racist even though they are just trying to maintain their socialist lifestyle? Please show that it is racism and not simply a move to keep their state a live. Don't forget that there are many Arabs living in Israel and some who serve in their government. And we don't prop up the Israeli government. We gave them a powerful nuclear arsenal because there are certain groups who are constantly trying to destroy them. You are trying to prove with this law that Israel is wrong, but if you look at it honeslty, this law is about survival, not racism.
You are funny. Please don't be so naive. If you are trying to make light of anti-Semitism in Arab countries, I find that shameful. I don't find it funny to talk about how Palestinians would be happy to see a "friendly" Jew when you know they would probably hang him or her as they read their copy of Mein Kampf. Please do not compare the situation of blacks to the situation of Palestinians, it does not compare IMO. I know that hatred and terrorism did not become the main part of the African American struggle.
I don't find it funny to talk about how Palestinians would be happy to see a "friendly" Jew when you know they would probably hang him or her as they read their copy of Mein Kampf. I'm not trying to be funny. Sorry guy. You can say it 100 times and it still doesn' t make it true, your bs about If an Israeli married a Palestinian and they moved to Palestinian areas, the Jew would be destroyed, Please quit bssing us and try to provide some proof for your little assertion.
