Israeli PM suffers setback in vote on Arab citizenship rights law
The Israeli parliament has voted down an extension to controversial legislation that bars Arab Israelis from extending residency or citizenship rights to Palestinian spouses, in an early blow to the country’s new coalition government.
After a marathon all-night voting session that ended on Tuesday morning, the Knesset decided not to renew the law in a 59-59 vote. The outcome is widely seen as a stinging defeat for the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who failed to unite the coalition’s disparate ideological wings in what he reportedly himself referred to as a “referendum” on the new government.
The vote means the law will expire at midnight and could trigger as many as 15,000 citizenship applications from people living in the West Bank and Gaza – a development the legislation’s supporters say poses security issues and threatens Israel’s Jewish character.
The interior minister, Ayalet Shaked, tweeted after the vote that watching members of Likud, former prime minister Benjamin Neyanyahu’s centre-right party, celebrate the vote’s outcome, alongside the Religious Zionism party and the Arab Joint List, was “madness” and a “great victory for postZionism”.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which human rights groups say is racist and prevents thousands of families from reuniting or living together, was introduced as temporary emergency legislation during the peak of the second intifada in 2003 in an attempt to quell terrorist attacks inside Israel.
Under the legislation, Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of Israel’s population, have had few if any avenues for bringing spouses from the West Bank and Gaza into the country. The law also applies to Jewish Israelis who marry Palestinians from the territories, although such unions are extremely rare.
The law has been renewed annually since it was introduced. Leftwing elements of the new government were unwilling to back it this time around, however, and Netanyahu and his allies in opposition saw the impasse as an opportunity to harm the coalition.
“With all due respect for this law, the importance of toppling the government is greater,” Netanyahu said Monday. “This isn’t just a law. It’s a law that exposes the fault-line in this government, whose purpose is to advance an anti-Zionist agenda.”
Israel’s three-week-old government was formed after the hardline Yamima party’s Bennett and his centrist partner, Yair Lapid, managed to bring together parties across the political spectrum, including an Arab party, with one shared goal: ousting Netanyahu from a 12-year stint in office.
An agreement to focus on areas of common ground in governance has quickly come unstuck, as both the citizenship law and disagreements on an evacuation deal for the illegal West Bank settlement Evyatar has shown.
Bennett proposed a compromise on the citizenship law with liberal members of the coalition that would have extended the legislation by six months while offering residency rights to 1,600 Arab families – a fraction of those affected. But the measure was defeated, in part because two Arab members of the coalition abstained.
The outcome, however, gave some hope to Arab families that have been affected by the law.
“You want your security, it’s no problem, you can check each case by itself,” said Taiseer Khatib, an Arab citizen of Israel whose wife of more than 15 years, from the West Bank city of Jenin, must regularly apply for permits to live with him and their three children in Israel.
“There’s no need for this collective punishment just because you are Palestinian,” he said during a protest outside the Knesset on Monday before the vote.
Male spouses over the age of 35 and female spouses over 25, as well as some humanitarian cases, can currently apply for the equivalent of a tourist permit, which must be renewed regularly. The holders of such permits are ineligible for drivers’ licences, public health insurance and most forms of employment.
Palestinian spouses from Gaza have been completely banned since the militant Hamas group seized power there in 2007. Palestinians who are unable to get permits but try to live with their spouses inside Israel are at risk of deportation.
Israel’s Arab minority has close familial ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza strip and largely identifies with their cause, viewing the law as one of several forms of discrimination they face in a country that legally defines itself as a Jewish nationstate.