Israel’s War of Arithmetic
Written by Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook is a British journalist living in Nazareth, Israel.
This is an edited extract from Chapter 3 of his new book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, published by Pluto Press.
This article was originally published in News from Within, Vol. XXII, No. 6, July 2006.
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The vast empty spaces of the Negev, Israel’s southern desert, are a playground for the Israeli army and the smugglers who cross its long open border with Egypt to trade in anything for which there is a demand: from cars and cigarettes to guns and women. The desert forms 60 percent of Israel’s land mass but is home to less than seven percent of its citizens. Many are to be found in Be’ersheva, a grim oasis of concrete that is the capital of the Negev and Israel’s fourth largest city. In early August 2003 I traveled there to meet Morad as-Sana, a Bedouin lawyer who had just returned from a honeymoon in Istanbul. He and his wife Abir, a lecturer in social work, had come back to a new law that made it illegal for them to live together. As they crossed over the border from Jordan, they were forced to part: Morad to his apartment in Be’ersheva, and Abir to her parents’ home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
While they were away, the Knesset had passed a temporary amendment to one of Israel’s founding pieces of legislation, the Nationality Law of 1952, making it impossible for an Israeli citizen to obtain a residency permit for a Palestinian spouse from the occupied territories. In effect, Israel had banned marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. Under the new law, 27-year-old Abir was barred from joining her husband in Be’ersheva, and Morad, aged 30, was banned by military regulations from entering a Palestinian-controlled area like Bethlehem. Israel had revoked a fundamental human right of its Arab citizens: the right to love and to raise a family.
The pair were far from alone in their enforced separation. The amendment, known as the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, discriminated against hundreds of Arab citizens recently married or preparing to marry a Palestinian from the occupied territories. It also promised an uncertain future for thousands more long-established couples: Palestinian spouses who had been stuck for years in Israel’s interminable naturalization process would now find their applications for a residency permit or citizenship frozen or refused. Without a permit, the families would either be forced into hiding or torn apart.
Morad and Abir were determined to live together. “We will live like fugitives,” said Morad, who had few illusions about what that would entail. “We won’t be able to give out our address, Abir will not be able to leave the house or work in Israel, or go to the doctor if she gets sick. We will learn to fear every knock at the door.”
The terrible plight of couples like Morad and Abir briefly caught the world’s attention. The amendment to the Nationality Law provoked outrage from international and Israeli human rights groups, which had no hesitation in calling the measure racist. Technically the law also applied to Israeli Jews who married Palestinians, but in practice only the rights of Arab citizens were being harmed. (The law, of course, did not apply to the other inhabitants of the occupied territories—the Jewish settlers). B’Tselem pointed out that the legislation violated Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty as well as a pledge in the Declaration of Independence that the state would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or ethnicity.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch submitted a joint letter of protest to the Knesset shortly before the vote on the amendment, urging parliamentarians to reject it because it contravened international law. Even the dovish interior minister, Avraham Poraz, who had been required to legislate the amendment by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was apologetic. He admitted: “It would be best if the bill never made it to the law books, because an enlightened and humane society should allow reunification of families.”
Such regrets were of little consolation to Morad. He had met Abir three years earlier on a peace-building program in Canada designed to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to trust each other and partly sponsored by the local Israeli embassy. “I am an Israeli citizen and this is supposed to be my state. What other country treats its citizens in this way?” he asked. “And what message does this [law] send us apart from that our government not only doesn’t trust the Palestinians but it doesn’t trust us either.” He paused briefly as he contemplated his future, and then added: “Where does it stop? What will they do next?”
As the bill passed the Knesset vote, Israeli officials strenuously denied that it had any racist intent. The law, argued the head of the Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, was “vital for Israel’s security.” He claimed that the government had been forced to block the entry of Palestinian spouses into Israel after a small number had abused their naturalized status to participate in terror attacks. Despite a petition to the courts, it was never clarified how many naturalized Palestinians had been involved in such attacks or in what ways. Several commentators suspected that the measure had been drafted not with security in mind but out of a fear that Palestinian applications for Israeli citizenship through marriage would eventually erode the country’s Jewish majority. Naturalization through marriage offered Palestinians from the occupied territories the one and only legal route to acquiring Israeli citizenship. A Ha’aretz editorial sounded less than convinced by Israel’s official arguments: “On the assumption that the bill is indeed for security purposes, as the government claims, [it] appears to be both an unnecessarily vehement and unbalanced reaction to the security situation.”
The story of “the separation wall through the heart,” as one international human rights lawyer called the legislation, slowly dropped off the media’s radar. Over the next two years large Knesset majorities renewed the temporary amendment. Only in May 2005 did the issue briefly flare up again, when the government made further modifications to the law, ostensibly designed to suggest a slight easing of the restrictions but which in practice made almost no difference.
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