Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Then the Oslo Accords offered a little-noted family-reunification provision that turned this trickle into a river: 137,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) moved between 1994 and 2002, some of them engaged in either sham or polygamous marriages.
Israel has two major reasons to fear this uncontrolled immigration. First, it presents a security danger. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, noted in 2005 that of 225 Israeli Arabs involved in terror against Israel, 25 of them, or 11 percent, had legally entered Israel through the family-unification provision. They went on to kill 19 Israelis and wound 83; most notoriously, Shadi Tubasi suicide-bombed Haifa’s Matza Restaurant in 2002 on behalf of Hamas, killing 15.
Second, it serves as a stealth form of Palestinian “right of return,” thereby undermining the Jewish nature of Israel. Those 137,000 new citizens constitute about 2 percent of Israel’s population, not a small number. Yuval Steinitz, now the finance minister, in 2003 discerned in the PA encouragement for family reunification “a deliberate strategy” to increase the number of Palestinians in Israel and undermine its Jewish character. Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, later confirmed this fear: “If Israel continues to reject our propositions regarding the borders [of a Palestinian state], we might demand Israeli citizenship.”
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In response to these two dangers, Israel’s parliament in July 2003 passed the “Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.” The law bans Palestinian family members from automatically gaining Israeli residency or citizenship, with temporary and limited exemptions requiring the interior minister to certify that they “identify with Israel” or are otherwise helpful. In the face of severe criticism, then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon affirmed in 2005 that “The State of Israel has every right to maintain and protect its Jewish character, even if that means that this would impact on its citizenship policy.”
Only 33 of 3,000 applications for exemptions, according to Sawsan Zaher, an attorney who challenged the law, have been approved. Israel is hardly alone in adopting stringent requirements for family reunification: Denmark, for example, has had such rules in place for a decade, excluding (among others) an Israeli husband from the country, with the Netherlands and Austria following suit.
Last week, Israel’s Supreme Court, by a 6–5 vote, upheld this landmark law, making it permanent. While recognizing the rights of a person to marry, the court denied that this implies a right of residency. As the president-designate of the court, Asher Dan Grunis, wrote in the majority opinion, “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”
This pattern of Palestinian emigration toward Jews goes back almost to 1882, when European Jews began their aliyah (Hebrew for “ascent,” meaning immigration to the land of Israel). In 1939, for example, Winston Churchill noted how Jewish immigration to Palestine had stimulated a like Arab immigration: “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased.”
In brief, you didn’t have to be Jewish to benefit from the Zionists’ high standard of living and law-abiding society. One student of this subject, Joan Peters, estimates that a dual Jewish and Arab immigration “of at least equal proportions” took place between 1893 and 1948. Nothing surprising here: Other modern Europeans who settled in under-populated areas (think Australia or Africa) also created societies that attracted indigenous peoples.
This pattern of Palestinian migration has continued since Israel’s birth. Anti-Zionist they may be, but economic migrants, political dissidents, homosexuals, informants, and just ordinary folk vote with their feet, preferring the Middle East’s outstandingly modern and liberal state to the Palestinian Authority’s or Hamas’s hellholes. And note how few Israeli Arabs move to the West Bank or Gaza to live with a spouse, though no legal obstacles prevent them from doing so.
The Supreme Court’s decision has momentous long-term implications. As Eli Hazan writes in Israel Hayom, “The court ruled de jure but also de facto that the state of Israel is a Jewish state, and thus settled a years-long debate.” The closing of the back-door “right of return” secures Israel’s Zionist identity and future.
Why do so many Muslims live in Israel? The answer is simple. Because Israel is a just society, in the extreme.
Why do no Jews live in Saudi Arabia? The answer is also simple. Because Saudi Arabia is one of the most unjust societies on Earth.
Where is the world outrage at no Christian Churches or Synagogues in Saudi Arabia? Muslim countries like Iraq, Iran, and Syria have all deported Jews. I wish Israelis would deport Muslims from Israel, not just bar them from entering.
Because Muslims lived as the majority in the region known as Israel until the Europeans showed up.
Israel is founded on immigration, some of it illegal, and during British Rule many of those Jewish immigrants started a terror campaign and would up threatening the ethnic make up of the region.
That is hogwash. The arabs were given 99.99% of Ottoman possessions and the Jews 'the rest'. That 0.01% is what their complaint is about. The land of Israel was always Jewish property, was always inhabited by a Jewish presence and will always be so whilst there are Jews around to make their claim. There is nothing you or the world can do about that.
The Jewish claim to their land is far better than the European claims to the New World. That is the bee in the leftist bonnet and that is why Jewish extermination, by so many polite euphemisms and proxies, is the agenda of the sanctimonious leftist swill and their supports.
Samuel Clements touring Turkish 'palestine' remarked on the emptiness of the land. The Jews came in the 1880s on the back of Russian and European pogroms and started to reclaim the swap infested, discarded and neglected land.
Just like the rest, whilst 'palestine' was a wasteland nobody wanted it. When the Jews transformed it into something, every thief raises his voice. Go and get your gun.
A good deal of history is lost in public education these days. Palestine was under the control of the Turks prior to World War I. The Turks allied themselves with the Germans during the war. The Germans lost the war. Palestine became a British mandate at that point in time. In November 1917 the Balfour Declaration indicated Britain's effort to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In March of 1920 during Passover, worshipers praying at the Western Wall were set upon by Arabs. Five Jews were killed. 211 were injured. Among those arrested was Haj Amin al-Husseini. Husseini escaped to Syria, but later returned. When his half brother died he was appointed Grand-Mufti by the British. He became a hard line Muslim ruler and further violence against Jews occurred. There had been Arab factions which co-operated with the Jews prior to Husseini's rise to power. He made an end to that. Eventually Husseini was stripped of his power by the British because of his violence, but he was still considered a religious authority among many Palestinians. He lived in Lebanon plotting against the Jews. In 1938 Palestinian bands acting on his behalf killed 297 Jews in Palestine. Husseini arrived in Berlin in 1941 as an ally of Adolph Hitler. If he didn't craft the final solution he certainly supported it. He made a foolproof ban on Jewish emigration out of Germany by closing off the escape route most accessible to European Jews.
After WWII Husseini fled to Egypt. There he was recognized as the leader of the Palestinian movement. Yasser Arafat was his devoted protege. Given this history it boggles the mind that the Israelis have been at all fair minded with the Palestinians who oppose them. Turn the tables and imagine that a small group of Muslims had a history of persecution and destruction by a larger group of Jews and ask yourself what the international reaction would be.
A splendidly informative article, particularly in regard to the oft-forgotten fact that many Arabs moved into "Palestinian" areas after (!) Jewish settlers made them livable. The usual suspects will wax hysterical about the new Israeli policy, but "social justice" must not be defined as national suicide.
A major motive for young christian families to emigrate from the holy land is that, in the many marriages that are 'across borders' (these exist because a) the Christian community is very small and cannot limit itself to borders for finding mates and b) the communities there have always been united and have intimate ties going back many centuries) it becomes very hard for the couple to establish a stable home. Now it has become impossible. The results are foreseen.
In addition what this law really communicates is that Arab Israeli citizens (who are descendants of families residents in these areas for centuries) are not considered to be citizens by their own government, and never will be.
Your right, there is NO problem to require a 'Pledge of Allegiance' to become a citizen, the USA requires that, but if this is for a select class of people than it's automatically racist.
When an immigrant to the US becomes a citizen,they take a citizenship oath,and also have to show knowledge of our Constitution and civics knowledge. I suspect any immigrant to Israel has to pledge allegiance to Israel.Also,the US does not automatically grant citizenship to foreigners who marry US citizens. I suspect we are stricter than Israel in that respect.
I believe it's presumptive to assume that all or most of these Arabs are "descendants of families that lived in the area for centuries". Unless you include "the area" to include Egypt,Syria,and Jordan. Until 1967,those Arabs were not "Palestinians",but Jordanian,Egyptian,or Syrian citizens,or migrants from elsewhere.Mostly from elsewhere.
“Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”
Solomon lives!
It only took the Jews 3000 years to get this right., paying an astronomical price along the way.
I wonder how long it will take Ameicans?
I find it disturbing that "a prescription for national suicide" was only avoided by a 6 - 5 vote. I don't know the precise numbers of Israel's various political factions, but the vote along with other indicators suggests that a permanent majority coalition made up of Arabs of questionable loyalty and various Left-wing groups could fatally undermine the Jewish state - a lesson we need to take to heart here when dealing with the open-borders crowd.
I think it's a concern any time, any where, and any how people live and work among regressive leftists.
After all, the destructive qualities of socialism know no bounds. It's been fatally destroying nations and civilizations for as long as it's been peddled as a theory of civic organization.
(Too bad Mitt Romney does not say as much when attacked for heading Bain Capital.)
Three things. First, Pipes' numbers on immigration under family reunification don't necessarily tell us much about what the flow of marriages currently is. Those numbers include ALL family reunifications, many of which were the reunification of families where some members had fled the 1948 war and then been barred from ever returning by Israel. Marriage has little or nothing to do with this, and if a family was inclined to reunite like this, chances are they did so by now.
Second, Pipes' quote of Ahmen Qurei isn't germane. There he is speaking of the (oft made) threat that the Palestinians could switch their tactics to demanding citizenship in a unified Israel / Palestine. He doesn't appear to have been addressing this marriage issue at all (and the given link goes to just the Jerusalem Post for today, thus not backing up the claim.
Thirds, this law hardly exists within a vacuum. Other bad laws have been proposed in the Knesset or even passed that would: make it a crime to advocate a boycott against Israel, make it illegal to commemorate the Nakbah (the founding of Israel as a tragedy), and require loyalty oaths. It is, in part, in this context that the new laws must be understood.
Now Israel has to deal with the problem of ultra-orthodox Jews who don't work and study Torah all day, and then demand the right to hate women and force them to sit on the back of the bus. The male unemployment rate among these people is 60%. These welfare queens need their welfare to be taken away from them. Then, once they are forced to actually hold down a job, they'll start to integrate into the larger Israeli society.
Israel has had orthodox Jews in its midst for millenia now, and, unlike you, they seem to have adjusted quite well.
Theirs is a far more socialist nation than ours, so let's try to avoid grafting our own economic and political sensibilities onto others.
I'm sure your concern for the effect of orthodox peoples on a society stretches to Italy, France and Belgium, too.
You're just an all-around swell guy looking out for everyone else.
It's just a little uncanny how many of you closet Lyndon LaRouche supporters, or dejected former members of the Buchanan Brigades who are now politically homeless, seem to desire to talk about nothing else other than all your gripes with the Jewish people.
Please keep on. You discredit yourselves quite nicely in the process, and that has very positive long-term political implications.
I haven't adjusted well? Buchanan brigade? I AM Jewish! I just got back from a ten day trip to Israel on Birthright. If you actually were actually interested int his issue, you'd know that there is a very big controversy in Israel right now over ultra-Orthodox Jews making women sit at the back of the bus.
They have a 60% male unemployment rate. That's not because they're a lot more socialist than we are, it's because these people have a disproportionate amount of political clout due to the fact that the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) has proportional representation, rather than representation based on districts, which favors small parties and requires deal making to form a governing coalition.
This idea of Jews using their religion to live of government welfare and avoid military service is NOT something that's been going on for millenia. I'm not against all Orthodox Jews - just the minority that doesn't work, doesn't serve in the IDF, and is sexist.
"The closing of the back-door 'right of return' secures Israel’s Zionist identity and future."
Really.
Silly me: I had this bizarre idea that "secur[ing] Israel's Zionist idenity and future" - assuming it could ever be done - would take one or more wars, the deaths of and injury to untold thousands, decades of time, the expenditure of untold billions of dollars and a major cultural and political re-evaluation by Israel's neighbors of their stance toward Israel and acceptance of Palestinians into their countires - entirely conditioned upon their military defeat or upon the cost of continuing to prosecute a war with Israel.
But all it takes is a law and an Israeli supreme court decision.
