Haaretz
Shvat 9, 5765
In the summer of 2003, the Knesset promulgated a
disgraceful law. The amendment to the Citizenship Law applied a sweeping
prevention of unification of families and marriages between Israeli Arabs
and Arabs from the region. Since the law was passed by the votes of 53 MKs
- including Shinui - there has been a total halt to any requests by
Israeli Arab citizens, including those who were already married and had
children, to enable them to live in Israel with their relatives.
In
effect, the state left its Arab citizens only one choice: to live in
another country with their non-Israeli spouses. The amendment
institutionalized discrimination against Arabs compared to any other
non-Jewish citizen. Since it was passed, Israeli citizens could marry any
non-Jew in the world and live with them in Israel, but if they married
Arabs "from the region," they could not live as a family in
Israel.
In the summer of 2004 the government extended the temporary
amendment by six months, and this week a memo went out from the Interior
Ministry ahead of a further extension. Since there have been petitions to
the High Court of Justice against the law in the meantime, and the court
has already hinted it will intervene if the law is extended again, the
government is now trying to make the law a little more flexible to prevent
the court from intervening.
According to a new, "easier" formula, a
man over the age of 35 or a woman over the age of 25, already married to
an Israeli, can get a permit to stay in the country for six months. The
underlying assumption apparently is that people who must extend their stay
in Israel every six months, and whom the law denies citizenship even if
they are model residents of the country, will prefer to live
elsewhere.
Once again, the government is trying to pull the wool
over the eyes of the High Court, announcing that the validity of the
amendment is for another year, on the assumption that the court will avoid
intervening in a temporary law.
For its part, the court indeed
could postpone its intervention for another year even though it convened
as an extraordinary 13-member panel to consider the petitions against the
law and expressed unhappiness with its content.
Before looking to
the High Court to solve all problems, the challenge of annulling the
racist law must be placed before two ministers with liberal outlooks:
Ophir Pines-Paz in the Interior Ministry and Tzipi Livni in the Justice
Ministry, the two ministries directly responsible for the legislation.
Their predecessors, Yosef Lapid and Avraham Poraz, turned their backs on
their liberal world views and caved in to the Shin Bet recommendations
that were behind the legislation.
It should be hoped that it's not
only up to the Shin Bet to decide who will fall in love with Israeli
citizens and with whom Israeli citizens will be allowed to marry and start
a household. The Citizenship Law in its old form allowed the state to
examine closely every immigrant and anyone who wanted to settle here. The
gradual naturalization process enabled the state to grant status over the
course of years of temporary visitor, temporary resident and permanent
resident until it granted citizenship status, and to examine each
potential immigrant from every possible angle - health, criminal, security
and economic - and the law allowed the state to reject requests for
citizenship on a variety of grounds. The citizenship tests for non-Jews
were always strict, but the new law cancels all the tests and prefers a
sweeping, disproportional denial of citizenship to Arabs from outside the
country. Such legal discrimination must not be allowed to
continue.