JERUSALEM, 14 July 2004 — Amnesty International yesterday called on the Israeli Parliament not to renew an “institutionally racist” law that bars Palestinians married to Israelis from obtaining their spouse’s citizenship.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which was passed onto the statute books by MPs on July 31 last year, “formally institutionalizes a form of racial discrimination based on ethnicity or nationality,” the London-based rights group said in a new report.
The law, which has to be renewed after a 12-month period, has forced many Israeli Arab citizens and residents of Arab East Jerusalem who hold Israeli identification papers, to live illegally with their Palestinian spouses in Israel or move to the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
For couples that decide to stay in Israel, their Palestinian spouses have no health insurance or other social rights and “every day fear arrest, expulsion and separation from their spouses or children.”
The report argues that the law is motivated by the desire to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel where some 20 percent of the population is of Palestinian descent, rather than for security reasons.
“The law constitutes a further step in Israel’s long-standing policy aimed at restricting the number of Palestinians who are allowed to live in Israel and east Jerusalem,” it says.
“In recent years Israeli officials ... have increasingly expressed concern at the number of Palestinian citizens of Israel, using expressions such as ‘demographic problem’ ... and in some cases even calling for their expulsion.”
Amnesty also highlighted increased restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedom of movement over the past three years, including the suspension of family unification procedures for Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza married to citizens or residents of other countries.
