[News] High court eases way for expulsion of Israel's Palestinian citizens

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/high-court-eases-way-expulsion-israels-palestinian-citizens>
High court eases way for expulsion of Israel's Palestinian citizens

Maureen Clare Murphy
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/maureen-clare-murphy> - 28 July 2022
------------------------------

So far only Palestinian citizens of Israel, and none of their Jewish
counterparts, have faced citizenship revocation under a 2008 law.
ActiveStills

Israel’s high court ruled <https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/10661>
last week that citizenship can be revoked over offenses constituting a
“breach of loyalty,” even if doing so renders a person stateless.

The decision provides the state with an additional legal mechanism to strip
Palestinians of their citizenship and fundamental rights.

The high court ruling was in response to an appeal by Adalah, a group that
advocates for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, and the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel.

The two groups were appealing a 2017 court decision approving the interior
minister’s move to revoke the citizenship of Alaa Zayoud, a Palestinian
from Umm al-Fahm who was imprisoned after ramming his car into a bus
station and stabbing three Israelis in 2015.

Israel has not revoked <https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9182> the
citizenship of Jewish Israelis involved in serious crimes.

In 1996, Israel’s high court rejected a request to revoke the citizenship
of Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yizhak Rabin, the prime minister, one year
earlier.

The high court rejected Adalah and ACRI’s argument that Israel’s 2008
“nationality law” was being used in a discriminatory manner against
Palestinian citizens of Israel.

That law
<https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2008-09-08/israel-revocation-of-citizenship/>
defines a “breach of loyalty to the State of Israel” as committing or
assisting a “terrorist act,” engaging in acts that the state considers
treason or espionage, or acquiring citizenship or permanent residency in
Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen or the Gaza
Strip.

However, according to Adalah, in the 31 cases in which the revocation of
citizenship was considered since the law was enacted, none involved a
Jewish Israeli citizen.

“There are many cases of Jews in Israel who took part in terror and not
even once has the interior ministry thought to appeal to revoke their
citizenship,” Oded Feller from ACRI told Reuters
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-supreme-court-rules-disloyal-citizens-can-be-stripped-status-2022-07-21/>
.

“The only cases that were submitted to the court were of Arab [Palestinian]
citizens,” Feller added.
“Discriminatory”

The Israeli high court acknowledged in its ruling that no comparable law to
revoke citizenship exists in any other country, according to Adalah and
ACRI.

The revocation of citizenship rendering a person stateless is a violation
of international law <https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9123>, as
established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various
conventions.

“The current case indicates that the law is discriminatory and will likely
be used exclusively against Palestinian citizens of Israel,” ACRI and
Adalah added.

The high court ruling must be understood in the context of the state’s
racist ideology. The 2018 “nation state” law
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-passes-law-entrenching-apartheid>
defines Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people” and that the
“right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is
unique to the Jewish people.”

The ruling should also be viewed as serving Israel’s overall goal of
colonizing Palestinian land and pacifying any any and all resistance
against it.

Israel is seeking to revoke the permanent residency of human rights
defender Salah Hammouri, who was born in Jerusalem and raised there,
claiming he “breached loyalty” to the state.

“How can a brutally subjugated and colonized population be expected to
pledge loyalty to its occupier?” Hammouri wrote
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-wants-deport-me-my-city-birth/31686>
in an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada in 2020.

“Israel has employed various strategies to force a 30:70 ratio of
Palestinians to Israeli Jews in the city,” Hammouri noted, referring to
Jerusalem. Israel has occupied the eastern sector of the city since 1967
and unilaterally annexed it in violation of international law.

Israel treats Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem as “permanent
residents” – as if they were foreigners who had moved there from abroad,
not Indigenous people bearing inalienable rights to live in, travel out of
and return to their native city and country.

“Since 1967, it has revoked the residency of more than 14,500 Palestinians
from Jerusalem, and thousands more face daily challenges to maintain their
residency and existence in the city,” Hammouri noted.
“Vulnerable”

That playbook, long used against Palestinians in Jerusalem, is now being
applied to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.

Writing for *Middle East Eye*
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestinian-strip-away-citizenship>,
Lana Tatour observes that “the court has cleared the way for what would
become the routine denaturalization of Palestinians with Israeli
citizenship, making them vulnerable to deportation, something Israel has
long aspired to.”

Tatour adds: “The decision to substitute citizenship with a so-called
permanent residency status might enable individuals to continue to have
access to some social services, but it strips them from the utmost
protection that citizenship is designed to grant: the right to remain at
home.”

Tatour notes that more than 150 Palestinians were charged with terrorist
offenses in the aftermath of the unity uprising in May 2021.

Now, Tatour writes, “all of them face the threat of having their
citizenship revoked. Palestinians know all too well what this could
potentially mean: expulsion from their homeland.”

Expulsion from their homeland is a fate shared by millions of Palestinian
refugees and their descendants who are barred from returning by Israel
solely because they are not Jewish.

Now Israel’s high court has approved one more tool in the state’s arsenal
to pursue its single organizing principle: the removal of native
Palestinians so they may be replaced by foreign Jewish settlers.
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