Conditional Citizenship for Palestinians in Israel
A bill to strip Israelis of their citizenship if they committed an act of terrorism and then received money from the Palestinian Authority passed its first of three Knesset votes on Monday by an enormous margin of 89-8. This is another step in the process of dismantling the already shaky civic status of Palestinians citizens of Israel. Following the Citizenship and Entry to Israel Law, which prevents Palestinian citizens from living in Israel with their non-Israeli spouses, and the nation-state law, which declared them to be second-class citizens, we now have a bill that would make it easy to strip the citizenship of people who committed terror attacks.
The bill’s true purpose – putting another significant crack in the status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens – is revealed by the discrimination it enshrines between Jewish and Arab terrorists. There are also Jewish Israelis jailed in Israel for committing terror attacks. Yet their citizenship isn’t in any doubt, solely because they are Jews.
Not a single Knesset member who voted for this bill would dream of revoking the citizenship of convicted Jewish terrorist Jack Tytell, the murderers of teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the people who burned the Dawabsheh family alive in the West Bank village of Duma, or Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Such a disparity in the treatment of people who committed acts of terror means there’s one group whose citizenship is stable and secure, and another whose citizenship is temporary, conditional and constantly under scrutiny. And lest there be any doubt, the work of revoking citizenship begins with people who committed serious crimes, but it won’t end there. It will spread and create additional pretexts for revocation, because it is based on the view that Palestinian citizens of Israel aren’t really citizens, but subjects; that they are citizens by grace rather than by right.
What is especially disturbing is that opposition Knesset members, particularly those from what is termed the center-left, supported the bill. This shows how deeply entrenched the idea of Jewish supremacy is even there. If the political blocs that are supposed to serve as an alternative to the government of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich aren’t even capable of opposing a bill that’s effectively an assault on the citizenship of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, how can they ever form a political partnership with this community?
The bill belies the very idea of citizenship, which is that people necessarily belong to some country or another. Citizenship is a fundamental right in itself as well as a condition for realizing most other fundamental human rights. Consequently, it isn’t supposed to be dependent on a person’s actions, or on whether he is a good, law-abiding citizen. People don’t lose their citizenship even when they commit serious crimes, not even when they commit atrocities. This bill must be shelved, as should any other proposals to further undermine the civic status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.