Israel’s high court upholds a law preventing Palestinians from living with their spouses in Israel.
The Israeli government has repeatedly demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”. Recent developments in the Knesset and High Court are exposing exactly what this means, and in doing so, throw the spotlight on the issue that the ‘peace process’ – and Western governments – refuse to tackle.
On Wednesday, Israel’s High Court rejected a legal challenge to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, by a six to five vote. The law, first passed as a ‘temporary’ measure in 2003 and renewed ever since, prevents Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (and those from ‘enemy states’) from living with their spouses in Israel.
For thousands of Palestinian families, Israel’s law means a choice between moving abroad, living apart, or living in Israel illegally. No wonder that the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) condemned what it described as a “racist law” for the way it harms “the very texture of the lives of families whose only sin is the Palestinian blood that runs in their veins”.
Legal rights centre Adalah, who have been deeply involved with challenges to the law, said that the High Court had “approved a law the likes of which do not exist in any democratic state in the world, depriving citizens from maintaining a family life in Israel only on the basis of the ethnicity or national belonging of their spouse”.
The Israeli government has argued that the law is on the grounds of ‘security’. But human rights groups like B’Tselem describe this as “baseless”. The “real reason” is that “Israel is seeking to prevent the further increase of the Arab population in Israel in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state”.
This motivation has never been completely hidden; in 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confessed that “there is no need to hide behind security arguments. There is a need for the existence of a Jewish state”. But with this ruling, the racist rationale for the legislation has been made more explicit.
In the majority opinion, Justice Asher Grunis wrote that “human rights are not a prescription for national suicide”, a term often invoked by those worrying about what realizing Palestinian rights would mean for Israel’s Jewish majority. This same phrase was invoked by the Interior Minister Eli Yishai, while coalition chair and Likud MK Ze’ev Elkin applauded the High Court judges for understanding, as he put it, that “human rights cannot jeopardize the State”.
A particularly instructive reaction came from Kadima MK Otniel Schneller, who said that the decision “articulates the rationale of separation between the (two) peoples and the need to maintain a Jewish majority and the (Jewish) character of the state”.
MK Schneller used the logic of racial separation to advocate for “two states for two peoples”, showing just how much overlap on fundamentals exists between ‘centrists’, and the likes of extreme rightist group Im Tirtzu, who said the ruling will “prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from flooding Israel”.