The citizenship law is experienced in this country as a political arm-wrestling match. The main focus is on whether the coalition will prevent family reunification between those living in Israel and those in the Palestinian Authority. The Meretz and Ra'am parties are leaning toward opposing the law, and the opposition, which had re-ratified the interim law 12 years running when Benjamin Netanyahu was in power, is threatening to join them. Failure to reapprove the law won't topple the government, but it will instigate a battle of narratives that will seek to pin the blame, on one hand, on Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, and on the one hand, on Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and the remaining members of the opposition.
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Amid this clamor, we can find a little bit of substance. The argument is framed as a security imperative on one hand – the law was born during the Second Intifada, recommended by the Shin Bet. On the other hand, it infringes on the human rights of tens of thousands of families that cannot live normal lives, including social and medical rights for parents and their children, bans on receiving driver's licenses and more.
My argument is that the country's security is a very important consideration, and can be preserved while improving the human rights of those living among us. We can be cynical about the Right's narrow political considerations. It's okay to remind ourselves that these are tens of thousands of families, mostly with temporary residency status that leads to daily annoyances and worse, while the Right wants to annex some 4 million Palestinians. It's also okay to remind ourselves that the same Shin Bet that wants to prevent family reunification has authorized citizenship for thousands of "collaborator" families, who the police view as chiefly responsible for the rampant crime in Arab society under the auspices of Shin Bet-granted "immunity."
And yet, I want to assume there is a real, poignant national security argument. This concern is predicated on past and often inaccurate statistics from the days of the Second Intifada, whereby Palestinians who become Israeli citizens are more involved in terrorist attacks.
It's important to understand that receiving Israeli citizenship is complicated and onerous for anyone who isn't Jewish, regardless. It can take years just to obtain residency status, followed by countless checks and proofs of marriage, cohabitation, children and more, until the long-awaited citizenship. And even then, the interior minister can decide to disapprove the citizenship. The law preventing Palestinian family reunification sweepingly negates the right to citizenship, with very few exceptions. In other words, if over the coming weeks Ayelet Shaked fails to secure a majority to renew the law, the only thing that will change is that her ministry will have to deal with each citizenship request on a case-by-case basis.
The law is a source of misery for tens of thousands of families that live among us anyway. It detachedly seeks to enforce an imagined reality of "separation," as if negating the right to receive medical care from a national health fund will keep Palestinians out of Israel. Just a reminder: There is a large Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, and tens of thousands of Palestinian cross the Green Line every day to work. We are all fated to live in this one place, from the river to the sea. If we want to live and prosper here well into the future, we need to work with this reality, not with the fantasy that the Arabs will somehow disappear overnight.
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