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Gershom Gorenberg: Anti-Family Values
Gershom Gorenberg
Shlomo meets Alice at a Costa Rica youth hostel; they fall in love, decide to marry, and since he�s been accepted to law school in Tel Aviv, they choose to live in his country rather than her Australia. She�s not Jewish, but as the wife of an Israeli, she applies to the Interior Ministry and begins a several-year process leading to citizenship.
Aysha, an Israeli from the town of Umm al-Fahm, marries her cousin Yusuf from Khirbet al-Taibe, just across the Green Line in the West Bank. With life getting tougher in the territories, they decide to live on her side of the line, and Yusuf applies to the Interior Ministry for "family unification," the process leading to citizenship. The application vanishes in bureaucracy, and each time Yusuf sees a Border Policeman, he fears arrest for illegal entry to Israel. Anyone who hires him is also breaking the law. He finds a lawyer, pays a hefty court fee, and petitions the Supreme Court for citizenship, and for an injunction against expulsion while the court considers the case. If he first applied for reunification before May 2002, he�s likely to get the injunction. Instead of an Israeli ID card, he�ll keep the court decision folded in his pocket to show police. If he applied after May last year, the court will probably turn him down. Worse, a government-backed bill in the Knesset is aimed at barring any West Bank Palestinians from joining spouses in Israel. Shlomo and Alice won�t be affected.
I don�t know an actual Yusuf and Aysha, Alice and Shlomo -- but there are many people in precisely these situations. An Umm al-Fahm lawyer told me he�s personally handled 10 Supreme Court petitions for men in "Yusuf�s" position, and knows of hundreds more. A cabinet decision of May 12, 2002, froze all family reunification requests for Palestinians married to Israelis. In June, the Knesset gave initial approval to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel bill, voting to send it to committee. If passed, it will turn administrative fiat into law, singling out Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as ineligible to join husbands or wives who are Israeli citizens.
Trust me, I�m not telling you about this because I want to bash Israel. I choose to live in Israel, because I believe in the idea of a Jewish state. But for a state to be Jewish, it�s not enough to have a Jewish majority; it should also aspire to live up to Jewish values. Blatantly discriminatory legislation doesn�t pass that test. And on a purely practical level this bill is a superb example of government action that can�t achieve its ends.
Ostensibly, terror is the reason that the cabinet voted in May last year to deny Palestinians a commonly accepted right in citizenship and immigration law. The child of a Palestinian father and an Israeli Jewish mother had been involved in a Haifa suicide bombing. Family reunification allows Palestinians to get Israeli papers and "move freely between Palestinian Authority territory and Israel," as the official explanation to the new citizenship bill argues. Answer: Stop family reunification.
If this were the real reason, it would be particularly pernicious racism, because it would discriminate against a class of people based on the acts of an individual, or a few individuals. It would be the equivalent of excluding American Jews from the Law of Return because the perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre was American, or barring Jewish immigrants from America because gangster Meir Lansky was a Jew from Russia.
The real concern that the policy addresses is demographic. For 36 years, Israeli opponents of the occupation have warned that Arabs are likely to become a majority in Israeli-ruled land, putting an end to the idea of a Jewish state. The occupation hasn�t ended. But the government appears more willing to address the problem of Palestinians settling within Israel proper and boosting the Arab population within the Green Line. An unknown number of West Bank and Gaza residents live illegally inside Israel. The fact that Palestinian leaders aren�t willing to concede the right of return deepens the fear: We�ll give up the West Bank and Gaza -- and still not ensure a decisive Jewish majority.
This is scary even for the Israeli left. On the right, you have voices like Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, who claims the Palestinian Authority is encouraging migration into Israel. (Steinitz also blames the PA for encouraging Palestinians to steal Israeli cars, as if no thief would heist a Volvo without ideological reasons.)
In fact, the main reason Palestinians prefer living in Israel has to do with daily existence. Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens; East Jerusalem Arabs with their status of permanent residents are third-class non-citizens. Nonetheless, it�s still worse to live in the West Bank, out of work, under occupation, with army roadblocks that make a 10-kilometer trip into an ordeal of hours. Some politicians expect building the border fence between the West Bank and Israel to keep Palestinians from settling illegally in Israel. It has actually increased the motivation. Hundreds of Umm al-Fahm women with West Bank husbands, I�m told, have relocated in the Israeli town since fence construction began, to avoid being trapped on the occupation side.
The first step toward addressing the demographic problem is a Palestinian state. Just the first step, because if they have to choose between minority status in Israel and hunger in independent Palestine, you can bet many will prefer the former -- even at the price of living in Israel illegally. Only if there is a viable, flourishing Palestinian state will Yusuf and Aysha have the same luxury as Shlomo and Alice, choosing a country based on purely personal taste -- and legally, they should have the same right to do so.
Those who want to maintain Israel�s Jewish majority should be working for peace, not dreaming up new, oppressive measures. And certainly, those who want to maintain Israel�s Jewish character should reject the effort to turn a racist policy into the law of the land.
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