[News] How Israel robs Palestinians of citizenship
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Sep 20 11:24:33 EDT 2017
https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-robs-palestinians-citizenship/21751
How Israel robs Palestinians of citizenship
Jonathan Cook <https://electronicintifada.net/people/jonathan-cook> - 19
September 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of
its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that
decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by
Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The
registry has been regularly criticized
<http://www.haaretz.com/acri-slams-interior-min-for-human-rights-violations-1.142580>
for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data <http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.808886>,
some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli
citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure
may be much higher.
The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to
suffer problems gaining citizenship too.
Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its
own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party,
in carrying out such revocations.
Sawsan Zaher <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sawsan-zaher>, a
lawyer with Adalah <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/adalah>, a legal
center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Government-strips-2600-Beduin-of-citizenship-due-to-registration-error-503664>
/The Jerusalem Post/ newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in
contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone
stateless.”
Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended
from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged
during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/video-bedouins-resist-israeli-plan-expel-40000-and-judaize-their-land>
in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naqab>.
One of the two fastest-growing
<https://www.abrahamfund.org/webfiles/fck/Research%20-%20Beduin%20English%20Final.pdf>
groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh
treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza
through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab
where the Bedouins can live.
Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ayelet-shaked>, the far-right
justice minister, warned <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.809617>
Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of
the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of
non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish
state into “an empty symbol.”
According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been
stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for
routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport,
obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.
Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go
on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.
Tip of the iceberg?
Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said
the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.
“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg
and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told
<http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.808886> the /Haaretz/ newspaper.
The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of
citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.
She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins
with revocation of citizenship to weaken
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/israeli-citizens-stateless-170831105301896.html>
long-standing land claims against the state.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired
<https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/newsletter/eng/apr06/ar2.pdf>
in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to
ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first
years after Israel’s creation.
Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,”
effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic
services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying
to revive <https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9049> the Prawer Plan
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/prawer-plan>, which seeks to evict
some 40,000 Bedouins
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-bedouin/arab-bedouins-protest-against-israeli-plan-to-move-them-into-towns-idUSBRE9AT0AG20131130>
– Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor
“townships.” The original plan was ostensibly frozen
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/withdrawal-prawer-plan-bill-major-achievement-palestinians-israel>
in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.
Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely
defenseless against steps to evict them.
Endless foot-dragging
Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe,
was one of several Bedouins who spoke to /Haaretz/ in August during a
protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bir-hadaj>.
He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new
identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed
citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,”
he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no
citizenship.”
Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to /Haaretz/ said: “No one
explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as
a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless
process of foot-dragging begins.”
Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship
had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is
a right available solely to citizens.
Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal
according to Israel’s own laws, but violates
<https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9123> the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless
Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which
Israel signed in 1961.
The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney
general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have
justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/unexplained-bureaucratic-error-could-leave-thousands-of-negev-bedouin-stateless/>
made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s
parents or grandparents were not properly registered.
Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for
non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip
<https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/536> some 750,000 Palestinians who
had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of
descendants, of a right to live in Israel.
A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles
<http://www.jewishagency.org/first-steps/program/5131> all Jews around
the world to instant Israeli citizenship.
Martial law
The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a
draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority
during Israel’s first 18 years.
Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave
their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their
communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the
1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in
many cases.
According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of
Bedouins were secretly expelled
<http://www.ipk-bonn.de/downloads/refugees_7full.pdf> into neighboring
Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.
Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from
their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”
This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for
the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents
or grandparents.
Adalah’s Zaher told /The Jerusalem Post/: “Basically, we’re talking
about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know
what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were
told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by
mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”
The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of
citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to
Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/east-jerusalem>.
However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as
permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israels-expulsion-jerusalem-lawmakers-overturned-now>
the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem
since the city’s occupation began in 1967.
Treated as foreigners
Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again
through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.
However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they
continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents
cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.
There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship,
either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses
of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.
According to /Haaretz/, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry
so unresponsive they have given up in despair.
The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent
arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even
then, the interior ministry was required to act within three years –
otherwise it had to make an application for revocation through the courts.
Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing
before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher
said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been
denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’
registration under the Law of Return.
Equal rights for equal burden?
The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar
claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish
citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/avigdor-lieberman>, the defense
minister, has repeatedly campaigned
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/lieberman-peace-talks-must-reassess-israeli-arabs-right-to-citizenship-1.314596>
on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that
Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an
equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.
However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin
families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.
Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a
tradition of military service, but have still been denied services.
Their homes are all under threat of demolition.
Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/umm-al-hiran>, which is currently
being demolished <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.811082>
to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as
trackers for the Israeli army.
Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told
/Haaretz/ he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he
applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the
Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to
regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.
No harm intended?
The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at
which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.
The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen
Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins
were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and
the figure could be even higher.
At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned
that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could
not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and
the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”
In a statement to /The Jerusalem Post/, the interior ministry denied the
evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had
been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now
the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain
citizens.”
Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month
approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian
convicted of carrying out an attack.
The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/alaa-zayoud>, from the town of Umm
al-Fahm <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/umm-al-fahm> in present-day
northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israel-revokes-citizenship-palestinian-disloyalty>
to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on
Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.
The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the
Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of
loyalty” to the state.
Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double
standard <https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9182> in not applying
the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a
Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old
Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-abu-khudair>, in Jerusalem
in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later
that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West
Bank village of Duma <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/duma>. None
had citizenship revoked.
In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the
citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had
assassinated Yitzhak Rabin
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yitzhak-rabin>, then prime
minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in
the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.
Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian
citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/eli-yishai>, then interior
minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq
<http://www.haaretz.com/yishai-revokes-citizenship-of-israeli-arab-1.34658>
and Kais Obeid
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/government-to-back-bill-allowing-court-to-rescind-traitors-citizenship-1.209449>
of citizenship.
Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek
court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/association-civil-rights-israel-acri>
have called a “dangerous precedent.”
The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such
revocations or condition citizenship for the Palestinian minority on
loyalty.
Ethnic cleansing
The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded
citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the
Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing
Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the
state’s Jewishness.
Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/03/israel1> that Israel’s
founding father, David Ben Gurion
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-ben-gurion>, should have
“gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians
from the newly founded state of Israel.
Research has shown <http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21669> that Ben
Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who
survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency,
chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian
refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach
their villages.
Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the
Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law,
legislation separate from that for Jews.
However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders
repeatedly attempted
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.564422> to find ways to
expel
<https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a9Z807D8QvIJ:https://www.badil.org/en/resources/documents/individual-studies.html%3Fdownload%3D82:60-years-after-the-nakba+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il>
Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to
leave.
Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted
<https://books.google.co.il/books?id=Qxo55svQBNUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uri+davis+apartheid+israel&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz1sGl6YjWAhXHOxQKHaZYCewQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=uri%20davis%20apartheid%20israel&f=false>
that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980,
when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly
awarding them citizenship.
Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.564422> of Palestinians
in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the
proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli
politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of
sections of the minority.
In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/benjamin-netanyahu>, Israel’s prime
minister, was reported <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.803880> to
have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap
that would move an area home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of
Israel to Palestinian control.
The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberman_Plan> to redraw Israel’s
internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.
In early 2014, the /Maariv/ newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first
posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10545947/Israel-proposes-land-swap-as-part-of-peace-deal-with-Palestinians.html>
Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.
/Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His
latest books are/ Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East /(Pluto Press) and/ Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair /(Zed Books). Website:
jonathan-cook.net <http://www.jonathan-cook.net/>/
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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