JERUSALEM, 15 May 2006 — Israel’s Supreme Court, in a landmark decision yesterday, narrowly upheld a law that bars many Palestinians from living in Israel with their Arab Israeli spouses and children. The ruling, one of the most significant civil rights decisions in years, drew fire from divided families, legislators and human rights activists who accused the high court of defending racist legislation.
The government says the law was legislated to protect Israeli citizens from Palestinians who would use family unification as a pretext to enter Israel to carry out attacks. Critics say the law is a pretext to restrict the number of Palestinian citizens.
“This is a very black day for the state of Israel and also a black day for my family and for the other families who are suffering like us,” said Murad El-Sana, an Israeli Arab attorney married to a Palestinian woman from the West Bank town of Bethlehem.
“The government is preventing people from conducting a normal family life just because of their nationality,” Sana told Israel Radio, minutes after the ruling was announced.
The court had granted Sana’s wife, Abir, a temporary injunction preventing her deportation. But Sana said the court’s ruling made it almost impossible for the couple and their two children, aged 2 years and five months, to continue living together.
The restrictions, imposed in 2002 at the height of the intifada, are believed to have kept hundreds, and possibly thousands, of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians from moving to Israel to live with their families. An expanded panel of 11 judges voted 6-5 against a petition to strike down the law.
The law states that only Palestinian women over the age of 25 and men over 35 are eligible to join their families in Israel, and eventually receive citizenship. It was enacted after a Palestinian who had acquired Israeli citizenship killed himself and 14 other people in a bomb attack on a Haifa restaurant in 2002.
“No place in the world is required to admit citizens from a country or authority with which it is in a state of conflict,” Justice Minister Haim Ramon said. “We have to remember that this law was legislated during the Palestinian uprising, when several people who received citizenship through family unification carried out attacks.” But the restrictions also cut to a more sensitive demographic issue — the fear that the country’s Jewish majority could be threatened if too many Palestinians were granted citizenship. Arabs account for nearly 20 percent of Israel’s more than 7 million people, while nearly 4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“We thought that the Supreme Court would be the last bastion and unfortunately, it failed in its mission,” lawmaker Zehava Galon of the dovish Meretz-Yahad party told The Associated Press. “The Supreme Court could have taken a braver decision and not relegate us to the level of an apartheid state.”
In a minority opinion, Chief Justice Aharon Barak argued that the law should be overturned because security concerns should not take precedence over basic civil rights. But the majority opinion contended that “the benefit it (the law) brings to the security and lives of the residents of Israel outweighs the harm it causes to some citizens of Israel.”
