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href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-robs-palestinians-citizenship/21751">https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-robs-palestinians-citizenship/21751</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">How Israel robs Palestinians of
citizenship</h1>
<p class="node__submitted"> <span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/jonathan-cook">Jonathan
Cook</a></span> <span class="field field-publisher">-</span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2017-09-19T17:39:00+00:00">19 September 2017</span></span>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/acri-slams-interior-min-for-human-rights-violations-1.142580">criticized</a>
for secrecy about its rules for determining residency
and citizenship.</p>
<p>According to government <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.808886">data</a>,
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.</p>
<p>The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship
are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sawsan-zaher">Sawsan
Zaher</a>, a lawyer with <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/adalah">Adalah</a>,
a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Government-strips-2600-Beduin-of-citizenship-due-to-registration-error-503664">told</a>
<em>The Jerusalem Post</em> newspaper: “This policy is
illegal and in contravention to international law
because you cannot leave someone stateless.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Today, some 200,000 Bedouins <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/video-bedouins-resist-israeli-plan-expel-40000-and-judaize-their-land">live</a>
in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as
the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naqab">Naqab</a>.</p>
<p>One of the two <a
href="https://www.abrahamfund.org/webfiles/fck/Research%20-%20Beduin%20English%20Final.pdf">fastest-growing</a>
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.</p>
<p>Revelations of the revocations emerged as <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ayelet-shaked">Ayelet
Shaked</a>, the far-right justice minister, <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.809617">warned</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Some have discovered their loss of status when
seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one
of the obligations for Muslims.</p>
<h2>Tip of the iceberg?</h2>
<p>Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the
Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had
intensified over the past 18 months.</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.808886">told</a>
the <em>Haaretz</em> newspaper.</p>
<p>The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have
been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of
the fact.</p>
<p>She said she believed that the government was in part
targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/israeli-citizens-stateless-170831105301896.html">weaken</a>
long-standing land claims against the state.</p>
<p>Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been <a
href="https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/newsletter/eng/apr06/ar2.pdf">mired</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9049">revive</a>
the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/prawer-plan">Prawer
Plan</a>, which seeks to evict some <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-bedouin/arab-bedouins-protest-against-israeli-plan-to-move-them-into-towns-idUSBRE9AT0AG20131130">40,000
Bedouins</a> – Adalah puts the figure at
80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships.”
The original plan was ostensibly <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/withdrawal-prawer-plan-bill-major-achievement-palestinians-israel">frozen</a>
in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.</p>
<p>Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins
would be largely defenseless against steps to evict
them.</p>
<h2>Endless foot-dragging</h2>
<p>Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the
al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke
to <em>Haaretz</em> in August during a protest rally
in the Naqab village of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bir-hadaj">Bir
Hadaj</a>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to <em>Haaretz</em>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not
only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but <a
href="https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9123">violates</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/unexplained-bureaucratic-error-could-leave-thousands-of-negev-bedouin-stateless/">bureaucratic
errors</a> made in the state’s early years meant
that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents
were not properly registered.</p>
<p>Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing
citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The
legislation’s primary purpose was to <a
href="https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/536">strip</a>
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.</p>
<p>A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, <a
href="http://www.jewishagency.org/first-steps/program/5131">entitles</a>
all Jews around the world to instant Israeli
citizenship.</p>
<h2>Martial law</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>According to reports by the United Nations and
others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly <a
href="http://www.ipk-bonn.de/downloads/refugees_7full.pdf">expelled</a>
into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early
years of the military government.</p>
<p>Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were
often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced
into overcrowded “townships.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Adalah’s Zaher told <em>The Jerusalem Post</em>:
“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.”</p>
<p>The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins
stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the
same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/east-jerusalem">East
Jerusalem</a>.</p>
<p>However, in practice, Israel does not treat
“permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that
Israel has <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israels-expulsion-jerusalem-lawmakers-overturned-now">voided</a>
the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in
East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in
1967.</p>
<h2>Treated as foreigners</h2>
<p>Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply
for citizenship again through a naturalization
process, treating them effectively as foreigners.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>According to <em>Haaretz</em>, other Bedouins have
found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have
given up in despair.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Equal rights for equal burden?</h2>
<p>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. <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/avigdor-lieberman">Avigdor
Lieberman</a>, the defense minister, has repeatedly
<a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/lieberman-peace-talks-must-reassess-israeli-arabs-right-to-citizenship-1.314596">campaigned</a>
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.</p>
<p>However, a proportion of those stripped of
citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served
in the Israeli army as desert trackers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Some of the residents of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/umm-al-hiran">Umm
al-Hiran</a>, which is currently being <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.811082">demolished</a>
to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community
of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.</p>
<p>Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized
village of Rahma, told <em>Haaretz</em> 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.</p>
<h2>No harm intended?</h2>
<p>The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a
meeting last year at which officials for the first
time gave details of the revocation policy.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>In a statement to <em>The Jerusalem Post</em>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The interior ministry gave <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/alaa-zayoud">Alaa
Zayoud</a>, from the town of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/umm-al-fahm">Umm
al-Fahm</a> in present-day northern Israel, the
status of temporary resident after he was <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israel-revokes-citizenship-palestinian-disloyalty">sentenced</a>
to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last
October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured
in that incident.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision,
pointed out a <a
href="https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9182">double
standard</a> 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, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-abu-khudair">Muhammad
Abu Khudair</a>, 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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/duma">Duma</a>.
None had citizenship revoked.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yitzhak-rabin">Yitzhak
Rabin</a>, then prime minister. The judges ruled
that such offenses should be dealt with in the
criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.</p>
<p>Previous revocations, though rare, have solely
targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/eli-yishai">Eli
Yishai</a>, then interior minister, stripped <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/yishai-revokes-citizenship-of-israeli-arab-1.34658">Nahad
Abu Kishaq</a> and <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/government-to-back-bill-allowing-court-to-rescind-traitors-citizenship-1.209449">Kais
Obeid</a> of citizenship.</p>
<p>Zayoud’s case was different because the interior
ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore
setting what Adalah and the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/association-civil-rights-israel-acri">Association
for Civil Rights in Israel</a> have called a
“dangerous precedent.”</p>
<p>The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify
many more such revocations or condition citizenship
for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.</p>
<h2>Ethnic cleansing</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/03/israel1">suggested</a>
that Israel’s founding father, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-ben-gurion">David
Ben Gurion</a>, should have “gone the whole hog” in
1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the
newly founded state of Israel.</p>
<p>Research has <a
href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21669">shown</a>
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.</p>
<p>Only in 1952, under international pressure, did
Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship
through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from
that for Jews.</p>
<p>However, scholars have noted that for more than a
decade Israeli leaders repeatedly <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.564422">attempted</a>
to find ways to <a
href="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">expel</a>
Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to
encourage them to leave.</p>
<p>Israeli scholar Uri Davis has <a
href="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">noted</a>
that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained
stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment
to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them
citizenship.</p>
<p>Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.564422">percentage</a>
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.</p>
<p>In July, the office of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/benjamin-netanyahu">Benjamin
Netanyahu</a>, Israel’s prime minister, was <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.803880">reported</a>
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.</p>
<p>The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberman_Plan">plan</a>
to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders
as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
their citizenship.</p>
<p>In early 2014, the <em>Maariv</em> newspaper
reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and
population exchange as a quick fix to <a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10545947/Israel-proposes-land-swap-as-part-of-peace-deal-with-Palestinians.html">reduce</a>
Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the
population.</p>
<p><em>Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special
Prize for Journalism. His latest books are</em>
Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East <em>(Pluto Press)
and</em> Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair <em>(Zed Books).
Website: <a href="http://www.jonathan-cook.net/">jonathan-cook.net</a></em></p>
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