Israel PM suffers defeat over Arab family unification ban
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked tweeted that the ban’s expiry could bring 15,000 Palestinian applications for Israeli citizenship
TEL AVIV: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett suffered defeat on Tuesday as lawmakers failed to extend a law that denies Israeli citizenship and residency rights to Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.
The ban first enacted in 2003 during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, has been justified by supporters on security grounds but critics derided it as a discriminatory measure targeting Israel’s Arab minority.
Bennett, a hardline religiousnationalist, supports the measure that has highlighted cracks in his ideologically disparate eight-party coalition, which has a waferthin majority in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.
In talks that ran through the night, the coalition sought a deal that would see nearly all of its members vote for the measure, including Jewish left-wingers and two Arab lawmakers from the conservative Islamic Raam party.
In exchange, the government would grant residency or citizenship rights to more than 1,500 Palestinians with pending requests who have been living in Israel for many years.
But that compromise failed when a member of Bennett’s hawkish Yamina party, Amichai Chikli, voted with the opposition, tweeting on Tuesday that the fracas over the bill exposed “the problematics of a government” that relies on the nominally antizionist Raam party and the Jewish left. “Israel needs a functioning Zionist government, and not a mismatched patchwork,” said Chikli, a vocal sceptic of the coalition crafted by his party leader Bennett last month.
His defection left parliament tied at 59 votes to 59, meaning the measure would lapse later on Tuesday.
Bennett had called for members of the right-wing opposition led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to support the measure in a plea for unity on national security grounds.