Even marriage isn't enough–Palestianians married to Israeli Arabs barred from living in Israel
Israeli Arabs are upset after Israel’s top court upheld a controversial law that prevents Palestinians married to Israeli Arabs from living in Israel.
By a vote of 6-5, the High Court of Justice on Sunday rejected petitions filed against the Citizenship and Entry Law.
While acknowledging that the law violates the human rights of the thousands of Israeli Arabs married to Palestinians, the High Court said national security must take precedence…
“On this day, the High Court effectively approved the most racist legislation in the State of Israel: legislation which bars the unification of families on the basis of national belonging: Arab-Palestinian,” Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, said in a statement.
If such a national security concern was warranted in the united states, you think anyone would have a problem with it?
From Ha’aretz’ editorial, “supreme disgrace”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/715825.html
There is no country in the Western world that does not limit immigration and set priorities in accordance with its needs at a given time. Immigration laws make it difficult for foreign partners of citizens to receive citizenship, and they combat fictitious marriages. But not one single Western country discriminates against some of its citizens by passing laws that apply only to them, and that impose limits only on their choice of a partner with whom they can live in their homeland.
It is difficult to accept the argument that the amendment to the Citizenship Law, which won the Supreme Court’s approbation yesterday, comes in response to a genuine security need. It is easier to accept the skeptical position of Justice Ayala Procaccia, who wrote that in light of the facts before her, she doubted whether the security explanation is the only one behind the law. The facts presented by the security establishment do not explain the law, since out of the tens of thousands who have become Israeli citizens since 1967 in the framework of family unification, only 26 have been questioned on suspicion of abetting terrorism. Since 1993, 16,000 requests for family unification have been submitted. This number also does not justify the demographic frenzy at which the justice hinted. The relatively small number of people suspected of abetting terrorism does not justify the blow the Knesset dealt to family unification in general, nor does it justify the injustice done in particular to hundreds of married couples who were barred from living in Israel because the law applied retroactively to couples whose cases were pending.
The justices did agree that the law infringes on the equality and human rights of Arab citizens of Israel, but they decided that this was trumped by the risk of terror. It is tough to be impressed by the security rationale when recalling the approximately quarter of a million Arabs from East Jerusalem who were annexed against their will, and who have given rise to more terrorists and terror accomplices than did all those who entered Israel as a result of marriage.
At least one of the Palestinian suicide bombers to have struck since 2000 was a resident of Israel through marriage, and Israeli Jews are all the more suspicious of Palestinians since they voted in a Hamas government earlier this year.
Now that’s sick.