Haaretz
Iyar 9, 5765
The amendment to the Citizenship
and Entry into Israel Law - which was approved this week in the cabinet -
creates three separate ethnic tracks for citizenship in Israel: a track
for Jews, a track for Arabs and a track for "foreigners."
The Arab
track not only requires a prolonged and graduated process, like that for
"the foreigners," but it also forbids, with a very minor exception, the
reunification of families when one of the partners is a Palestinian Arab
who lives in the occupied territories. The Jewish track, on the other
hand, allows every Jew to become an Israeli citizen automatically,
according to the Law of Return.
Supporters of the amendment,
including prominent members of the academic world, claim that every
country is permitted to determine its immigration policy. That is true,
but first of all, we are not talking about immigration, but about granting
legal status to the partner of a citizen.
Second, there is no
democratic country in the world that restricts immigration on the basis of
ethnicity. Third, the ethnic component - the "Arab" component in our case
- is the identity component of 20 percent of all the citizens of the State
of Israel, and therefore, such a step has the power to grant open and
official legitimization for discrimination against Arab citizens, in all
areas.
Some of the supporters of the law are trying to justify it
by comparing it to Danish policy. This is a misleading comparison, first
because Danish law is an exception, and second, it is at present
undergoing constitutional review, which will probably lead to its
invalidation. In addition, the Danish law does not create ethnic
citizenship tracks, nor is it as sweeping as the Israeli law, since it
leaves room for considering individual cases.
However, the relevant
question is whether supporters of the law are willing to adopt the entire
citizenship and immigration policy of Denmark. Their reply will certainly
be negative, since they oppose turning Israel into a civil state with
these modern democratic policies. It seems that some of those same members
of academe have adopted a new hobby: They have become hunters who search
for mistakes and defects that characterize democracies the world over, in
order to adopt them and to turn them into the supreme norm in
Israel.
The central and important issue here is that we are not
talking about immigration, as the government claims, but about abolishing
the personal freedom of Arab citizens, and their right to choose their
partner and to conduct a normal family life. This restriction does not
affect the Jews or the foreigners in Israel, and it has no parallels in
democratic countries today.
However, it does have parallels in the
past: In the 1950s, the state of Virginia in the United States forbade
miscegenation, mixed marriages of blacks and whites. For that reason, the
Lovings were forced to leave Virginia, and they appealed regarding the
constitutionality of the law. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this
legislation because it was racist. In 1980, at the height of apartheid,
the South African court overturned - out of its recognition of the right
to conduct a family life - the order forbidding a black woman to live with
a black man who, because of his work, had received a permit to live in a
white area.
Supporters of the amendment to the Citizenship Law want
to justify it for demographic reasons. They are not satisfied with giving
preference to one group because of its ethnic affiliation (the Jewish
track), they want to deny basic freedoms to the other group, because of
its ethnic affiliation (the Arab track). Therefore, the amendment to the
law reflects a transition from a situation of invalid discrimination to a
situation of racist oppression.
Supporters of the amendment claim
that it is necessary in order to maintain the Jewish majority in the
country. However, if this goal allows the government to take such a
drastic step, and to undermine basic constitutional rights such as the
right to a family life, then why shouldn't the Upper Nazareth
municipality, for example, prevent Arab citizens in the future from
purchasing apartments in its jurisdiction, claiming that this is essential
in order to protest the Jewish character of Upper Nazareth, or
alternatively, impose a higher arnona (property tax) on Arab residents, in
order to deter them from building a house in its jurisdiction? That is the
slippery slope of the demographic argument, behind which lies
racism.
Supporters of the law claim that international law permits
the undermining of basic rights in a war situation. That is true, to a
certain extent, but apparently, an elementary fact has slipped their
phenomenal memory: International law excludes from this rule the principle
forbidding discrimination, whose violation is absolutely forbidden even in
a war situation - article 4 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights - in light of the lesson learned from the horrors of the
Holocaust and World War II.
The conclusion is clear: The amendment
to the Citizenship Law is not only blatantly and radically
unconstitutional, it even contradicts basic human morality.
The
writer, a lawyer, is director of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab
Minority Rights in Israel.