(1) Israel's Citizenship Law excludes Arabs

Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:34:08 +0100 From: "Kristoffer Larsson"
<[email protected]>

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/528450.html

Racist legislation

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.

(2) Israel strips Palestinians of their East Jerusalem property

Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:28:12 -0800 From: Jeffrey Blankfort
<[email protected]>

Israel strips Palestinians of their East Jerusalem property

By Meron Rappaport,

Haaretz Thu., January 20, 2005

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/529510.html

The Sharon government implemented the Absentee Property Law in East Jerusalem
last July, contrary to Israeli government policy, since Israeli law was extended
to East Jerusalem after the Six Day War. The law means that thousands of
Palestinians who live in the West Bank will lose ownership of their property in
East Jerusalem.

Government officials estimate the assets total thousands of dunam, while other
estimates say they could add up to half of all East Jerusalem property.

The government decision in July confirms a decision reached in the ministerial
committee for Jerusalem affairs a month earlier. The decision was presented to
the prime minister and attorney general and met with their approval, but the
decision was not publicized until now and is not listed on the Web site of the
Prime Minister's Office.

The Absentee Property Law of 1950 stipulates, among other things, that an
absentee is someone who at the time of the War of Independence "was in any part
of the land of Israel that is outside the area of Israel" - that is, the West
Bank and Gaza Strip.

According to the law, absentee assets are transfered to the authority of the
Custodian for Absentee Property, without the absentee being eligible for any
compensation. When East Jerusalem came under Israeli law, then-attorney general
Meir Shamgar directed that the law not be applied to West Bank residents who
have property in the parts of East Jerusalem that became part of the State of
Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reissued that directive in 1993.

With the recent construction of the fence in the Jerusalem region, Palestinian
landholders from Bethlehem and Beit Jala requested permission to continue
working their fields, which are within Jerusalem's municipal jurisdiction. The
state's response stated that the lands "no longer belong to them, but have been
handed over to the Custodian for Absentee Property." At stake are thousands of
dunam of agricultural land on which the Palestinians grew olives and grapes
throughout the years.

"These people's property was always considered absentee assets, but so long as
no fence existed, these people could get to their property and everything was
fine from their standpoint," said a senior judicial official involved in the
case. "The fence is the result of terrorism. It's not fair that a man becomes an
absentee because his tie to his land has been cut without his doing. But
morality is one thing, and what is written in our laws another."

The Palestinian landholders and their Israeli lawyers term it a "land grab," and
also worry that nascent Housing Ministry plans will build on part of absentees'
land.