Roundup: Israeli High Court Disagree with Governmen't's Decision Against Israeli Arabs

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 15, 2002

Roundup: Israeli High Court Disagree with Governmen't's Decision Against Israeli Arabs

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The Israeli High Court on Sunday gave the government four months to explain why it has officially frozen family reunification between Israeli Arabs and West Bankers and Gazans to prevent those coming from the Palestinian territoriesfrom gaining Israeli citizenship.

The High Court issued the order in response to petitions by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Adallah, the Israeli Arab human rights organization.

The petitions claimed that the decision is a unacceptable discrimination against Israeli Arabs since they are the only Israeli citizens with families in the Palestinian territories.

Over the past eight years, the Israeli government has granted citizenship to 12,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as Jordan, who have married Israelis, increasing the number of Israeli Arab population to 100,000.

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai froze the procedures for the family reunification on April 1, 2002, following the terrorist attack in Israel's northern coastal city of Haifa, in which 14 people were killed and 40 others injured.

The perpetrator of the attack was a Palestinian who married an Israeli Arab and became, through the family reunification procedure, an Israeli citizen, and thus was able to travel freely throughout the country with an Israeli identity card.

The Association for Civil Rights claimed that Yishai's decision was "racist, discriminatory, and gravely harms the basic right to family life of Israeli citizens who married Arabs."

The organization said the government is arbitrarily punishing people who innocently married Israeli citizens on the grounds that they married in order to use the citizenship process as a way to harm the state. The petition asks the court to order Yishai to cancel the freeze on applications.

Attorney Sharon Avraham-Weiss presented the petition which he claimed is based on three cases, all of which involve Jordanians who married Israelis.

As a result of Yishai's decision, the Jordanian spouses are all illegally in Israel, Weiss said, adding that "it is incredible thatbasic rights of an entire group will be affected because of a single case of exploiting Israeli citizenship law to do harm."

Her petition claims that Yishai's decision, taking effect as from April 1, gravely harmed the three families she is representingas well as hundreds more in which an Israeli is married to an Arab.All three families met all the legal and security checks.

Among the three Jordanian spouses, one was married to a Tel Avivwoman. They were married overseas. After arriving in Israel, the wife applied for citizenship on her husband's behalf. Two months later, the man went to Jordan to look after an ailing child from his previous marriage, staying there until December, 2000 when the child died of cancer.

But when the man asked to return to Israel, he was turned away. Only after nine months he was allowed back to his Israeli family. In October last year, he was given a temporary work permit, which expired last month.

When the couple contacted the related ministry to continue his naturalization process, they were told that there was no point in coming since there would be no processing of citizenship applications as a result of Yishai's decision.

Attorney Yochi Gnessen, the Israeli government's representative,argued that the freeze was a temporary measure necessitated by the current security situation.

"Within six months, the government would formulate a new, more cautious policy," he said.

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