guardian.co.uk,
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem, Thursday 12 January 2012
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| A man waves the Palestinian flag at the separation wall between Israel and Palestine. Most Palestinians who marry Israelis are banned from living in Israel. Photograph: Oliver Weiken/EPA |
The supreme
court has narrowly voted to uphold a law which bans thousands of Palestinians
who are married to Israelis from living in Israel. The ruling was denounced as
racist by human rights organisations.
Following a
five-year legal battle, the court ruled the Palestinians could pose a security
threat. "Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide,"
wrote Asher Grunis, one of the judges in the 6-5 majority ruling.
The law,
which was introduced in 2003 as emergency legislation during the second
intifada (Palestinian uprising), has prevented thousands from the West Bank and
Gaza from living with their spouses who are generally Israeli Arabs.
Many
families are forced to move out of Israel, live apart, or live together
illegally in Israel.
Exemptions
can be granted for Palestinian men over the age of 35, or women over 25.
However, according to Adalah, a legal rights group representing Israeli-Arabs,
only 33 out of 3,000 applications for exemptions were granted last year.
The
232-page judgment was in response to a number of petitions which argued the law
infringed the basic right to family life of Israel's 20% Arab population. The
court ruled: "The right to a family life does not necessarily have to be
realised within the borders of Israel."
One of the
minority judges, Edmund Levy, wrote: "This law is greatly harmful. Its
damage resonates. Its legislation is a formative event in the history of
Israeli democracy."
Among those
awaiting the decision was Taysar and Lana Hatib, who married six years ago. He
is from the northern Israeli city of Acre; she was originally from Nablus in
the West Bank.
Lana has a
temporary residency permit which must be renewed annually, and which prohibits
her from driving a car.
"The
decision is proof that one shouldn't have any faith in the Israeli judicial
system," Taysar told the Israeli news organisation Haaretz. "It is
clear that the supreme court is influenced by the wave of fascism and racism
sweeping Israel and the judges weren't expected to act in any other way."
The ruling,
he said, put an end to hopes for a normal life.
Adalah, one
of the organisations which challenged the law, said: "The supreme court
approved a law the likes of which do not exist in any democratic state in the
world, depriving citizens from maintaining a family life in Israel only on the
basis of the ethnicity or national belonging of their spouse.
"The
ruling proves how much the situation regarding the civil rights of the Arab
minority in Israel is declining into a highly dangerous and unprecedented
situation."
The
Association of Civil Rights in Israel, another petitioner, said it was "a
dark day for the protection of human rights and for the Israeli high court of
justice".
The law was
racist, it said, and would "harm the very texture of the lives of families
whose only sin is the Palestinian blood that runs in their veins".
(Subjects: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Muhammad, Jesus, God, Jews, Arabs, EU, US, Israel, Iran, Russia, Africa, South America, Global Unity,..... etc.) (Text version)
"If an Arab and a Jew can look at one another and see the Akashic lineage and see the one family, there is hope. If they can see that their differences no longer require that they kill one another, then there is a beginning of a change in history. And that's what is happening now. All of humanity, no matter what the spiritual belief, has been guilty of falling into the historic trap of separating instead of unifying. Now it's starting to change. There's a shift happening."
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