‘Revoke Palestinian attackers’ residency’

IPalestinians say the move to revoke the residency of Palestinians living in Jerusalem is part of an Israeli plan to weaken their connection to east Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1967, and Palestinians insist must be the future capital of a Palestinian state.

There are about 300,000 Palestinians living in east Jerusalem who are permanent residents of the city, albeit not as Israeli citizens. Yet, they can vote in municipal elections (although most choose not to), have access to Israeli health care,

Problematic law

srael’s Interior Minister Gilad Erdan this week revoked the permanent resident status of Mahmoud Nadi, a Palestinian who drove a suicide bomber to the 2001 terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv. The attack left 21 teenagers dead and more than 130 wounded. Nadi, who dropped the suicide bomber off at a mosque across the street from the nightclub, served ten years in jail.

Erdan’s decision means Nadi is no longer eligible to receive any rights or services from the state of Israel, including health care and social security payments. In his decision, Erdan, who took on the position of Interior Minister after his predecessor Gideon Saar resigned, addressed the convicted man directly, noting that, “Under these circumstances and in view of the severity of your actions, [assisting in the attack] is a blatant breach of trust as a resident of the State of Israel...I decided to use my authority and cancel your permanent residence permits in Israel,” Erdan wrote.

The move could be the precedent for a broader attempt to punish Palestinian terrorists and their families, setting a standard of revoking their residency. Israeli officials have recently revived the policy of demolishing the homes of terrorists, a policy some deride as the illegal administration of collective punishment.

The moves come after the attack on a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem earlier this month that left five Israelis dead, and many feeling shaken at the brutality of the attack — in which the killers used a pistol and long knives and cleavers —carried out in a house of worship. The idea is that if family members believe they will suffer some kind of punishment, they will do more to stop the terrorist attacks.

Losing sympathy

But some in Israel say that these types of measures could backfire. “This is totally non-effective,” David Newman, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben Gurion University said. “It plays into the hands of the enemy which accuses us of ethnic cleansing. Policies like revoking residency and destroying homes means Israel will lose any sympathy it might have gained from the terrorist attack.”

Problematic law Israeli human rights activists say that the law to remove the citizenship of family members of terrorists

is problematic.

and receive social security payments. They also pay Israeli income tax and Jerusalem property tax.

Hamoked, Center for the Defense of the Individual, says that more than 14,300 Palestinians have lost their residency status in Jerusalem since 1967 due to a law that says anyone who lives outside of Jerusalem for seven years could have his or her residency revoked.

Israeli human rights activists say that the law to remove the citizenship of family members of terrorists is problematic.

“The criminal justice system is based on the fact that family members of someone who commits a crime are not liable for any punishment,” said Ronit Sela, the head of the East Jerusalem Project at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). “People who break the law and are a danger to society should be placed behind bars, but not their families.”

She cites the example of Yigal Amir, the extremist Jew who was convicted of killing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and his brother Hagai was convicted of conspiracy to murder. Hagai was released in 2012, but the rest of Amir’s family was not seen as being responsible for his deed and were not punished.

Sela said she did not believe that the new law would be a deterrent, either. At one point the Israeli government apparently agreed as well. It halted demolitions of the homes of Palestinian attackers’ families for nine years after concluding that the measure did not serve as a deterrent. —The Media Line