In an attempt to embarrass the coalition, opposition members were set to once again introduce for preliminary reading a proposed amendment to Israel's citizenship law to the Knesset that would revoke the citizenship and permanent residence status of terrorists who receive stipends from the Palestinian Authority, Wednesday.

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An initiative of Religious Zionist Party MK Orit Strock and Likud MK Avi Dichter, the legislation earned the support of many current coalition members who may now find it difficult to vote in favor of the bill for political reasons.

According to the bill's wording, the legislation aims to "determine that an Israeli citizen or holder of a permit residence permit in Israel sentenced to prison following a conviction for perpetrating an act of terror and shown to receive compensation for the act from or on the behalf of the Palestinian Authority will lose their citizenship or right to permanent residence in Israel."

While the bill was introduced in the previous government, it failed to advance due to that Knesset's dissolution.

Boaz Kukia, one of the heads of the "Choose Life" forum of bereaved families, has asked coalition members to "allow the freedom of voting so that we know who is acting to defend Israel's citizens and who, for ulterior motives, isn't."

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Right-wing Knesset members Orit Strock and Avi Dichter plan to submit a draft bill to the Ministerial Committee on Legislation Sunday to revoke convicted terrorists who receive monthly stipends from the Palestinian Authority of their Israeli citizenship.

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In the abstract of the bill, the Religious Zionist Party and Yamina MKs explain that "many [terrorists] who hold Israeli citizenship or are permanent residents receive monthly salaries from the PA as a reward for committing acts of terrorism.

"For example, the terrorists who killed [IDF] soldier Avraham Bromberg in 1980 receive a monthly salary of 12,000 shekels [$3,700] from the PA. According to calculations by the Palestinian Media Watch, by the end of October 2020, the PA had paid the murderers more than NIS 3 million [$914,000] altogether."

Strock and Dichter added, "It is inconceivable that Israeli citizens and [permanent] residents who not only betrayed the state and Israeli society, but also agreed to receive payments from the PA as a reward for committing acts of terrorism ... should continue to hold Israeli citizenship."

The Choose Life Forum, which works with bereaved families and victims of terrorism, sent a letter to committee members, asking them to back the legislative proposal.

"The law is intended to solve a difficult problem that exists today," the letter said, for "the authority to denaturalize terrorists is only given to the Interior Minister ... and in practice, this authority cannot be exercised."

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Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked signed off Tuesday on the denaturalization of Ashraf Hassan, a member of Hamas.

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Shaked based her decision on information she received from military officials, who told her Hassan had  orchestrated an attack on an Israeli soldier and taken advantage of his Israeli citizenship to move around the country freely in pursuit of his plans.

In 2004, Hassan was convicted for plotting to kidnap and kill an Israeli soldier and was sentenced to nine years in prison. He maintained his ties with Hamas after his release. He left Israel in 2016 and has not returned since.

The Interior Ministry said it was proceeding with Hassan's denaturalization with urgency as "a matter of national security" and in an effort to deter others who might be planning to commit terrorist actions against Israel.

Shaked also approved the revocation of the permanent residency of Salah Hamouri, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Hamouri was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to seven years in prison for plotting to murder a prominent Israeli rabbi. He was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Schalit prisoner swap. After his release, he continued his terrorist activities.

"Salah Hamouri's actions are a serious violation of the basic core commitment of an Israeli citizen, and due to this breach of trust, the revoking of his citizenship is legally justified," Shaked explained.

In 2008, the Knesset enacted a law according to which the government can revoke the citizenship of any Israeli citizen due to breach of trust or disloyalty to the state.

The revocation of Hassan and Hamouri's citizenships must be approved by Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit and Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar.

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The latest such incident occurred when Elie Rosen, a local Jewish community leader in Vienna, was nearly assaulted in a suspected anti-Semitic attack last week when an unidentified man attempted to wound him with a wooden club.

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Rosen was not injured in the attack. Police said that a 31-year-old Syrian refugee was later arrested in connection with the incident in the city Graz.

And earlier this month, a synagogue in Graz was found vandalized with the words "Free Palestine" spray painted on the front entrance of the building, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The city, located about 80 miles southwest of Vienna, has an estimated Jewish population of 150 members.

Karoline Edtstadler, Austrian Minister for European Policy, said the incident prompted her to act and work on measures to combat anti-Semitism.

An outline of the plan seeks to establish a new department dealing with such instances within the Austrian Chancellery Office.

A new online platform is also under development and will allow Internet users to report any "anti-Semitic and/or anti-Zionist incident" across the country.

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Edtstadler also confirmed that Israeli descendants of Holocaust victims will soon be allowed to obtain Austrian citizenship.

"Citizenship applications will be accepted from September 1," she said.

Previously, only the survivors themselves had the right to obtain citizenship. In addition, it was only offered to those who had left Austria before 1945.

This article was originally published by i24NEWS.

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They are particularly concerned over the increasing use of the measure by Britain which this year revoked the nationality of "jihadi bride" Shamima Begum who left London to join Islamic State in 2015 at the age of 15.

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Britain is also considering the case of British-Canadian Muslim convert Jack Letts who joined ISIS as a teenager and is now being held in a Kurdish-run jail in northern Syria.

"Stripping nationality is a completely ineffective measure – and an arbitrary measure," said Amal de Chickera, co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness, which is hosting the conference in The Hague.

He said countries should retain responsibility for nationals accused of supporting ISIS and ensure they are prosecuted.

"Stripping nationality when people are abroad merely exports the problem to other countries," he said, adding such measures were also likely to have a serious impact on families back home.

Countries should recognize that women married to ISIS fighters, and their children, may have been victimized, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Friday.

The conference heard that Britain stripped nationality from more than 100 people in 2017, compared to a total of 12 people between 1950 and 2002, but most cases were done quietly.

De Chickera said it was crucial that all countries' counterterrorism policies should not result in more people becoming stateless – which means someone is not recognized as a national by any country in the world.

To avoid making people stateless, Britain has focused on dual nationals.

But Audrey Macklin, a human rights law professor at the University of Toronto, said if all countries had laws to revoke citizenship from dual nationals then you would get a race to see who could do it first "and to the loser goes the citizen."

"Is this a policy that makes sense as a global practice directed at making the world more secure, at reducing the risk of terrorism? To my mind, not so much," she said.

She said citizenship was a right rather than a privilege and described citizenship deprivation followed by expulsion as the "political equivalent of the death penalty."

The conference comes midway through a UN campaign to end statelessness in a decade. An estimated 10 to 15 million people are stateless worldwide, often deprived of basic rights.

Jawad Fairooz, a former Bahraini MP who was rendered stateless after being stripped of his nationality in 2012, said revoking citizenship should never be used as a political tool or a punishment.

Bahrain has stripped hundreds of people of nationality since a 2011 uprising although many have since regained citizenship.

"If you lose [citizenship], you lose the rest of your rights," said Fairooz, chairman of Salam for Democracy & Human Rights.

"If you are born in a country and serve the country and you [are] part of it and quite suddenly your name is deleted from that country it is really heartbreaking."

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To remedy what their parents, a gay married couple, view as an injustice, Ethan Dvash-Banks became a plaintiff at the tender age of 16 months in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. State Department that seeks the same rights his brother has as an American citizen.

Each boy was conceived with donor eggs and the sperm from a different father – one an American, the other an Israeli citizen – but born by the same surrogate mother minutes apart.

"What we're trying to do is pursue justice for Ethan," said Elad Dvash-Banks, Ethan's biological dad, "and correct a wrong that the State Department is continuing to pursue that might affect other couples."

The lawsuit was one of two filed Monday by an LGBTQ immigrant rights group that said the State Department is discriminating against same-sex binational couples by denying their children citizenship at birth. The cases filed in Los Angeles and Washington by Immigration Equality said the children of a U.S. citizen who marries abroad are entitled to U.S. citizenship at birth no matter where they are born and even if the other parent is a foreigner.

The State Department said it does not comment on pending litigation, but pointed to guidance on its website that says there must be a biological connection to a U.S. citizen to become a citizen at birth.

Aaron Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality, said the State Department is wrongly applying a policy for children born out of wedlock to married same-sex couples.

"If a mother and father walk into a consulate and have a marriage certificate and birth certificate, they're never asked any questions about the biology of the child," Morris said. "But the converse is also true and every same-sex couple will be asked that."

The other case filed Monday involves two women, one from the U.S., and one from Italy, who met in New York, wed in London and each gave birth to a son. The State Department did not recognize the couple's marriage, the lawsuit said, and only granted citizenship to the boy whose biological mother was born and raised in the U.S.

Citizenship issues frequently arise with births overseas – even for heterosexual U.S. citizens – and particularly with the use of artificial insemination and surrogates, said immigration lawyer Ally Bolour, who is not involved in the lawsuit.

The Supreme Court's rejection in 2013 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which had barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, opened the door to the potentially ground-breaking challenges now being brought, he said.

"This is an absolutely fascinating, cutting-edge area of law that stems from [DOMA] being overturned," Bolour said. "It was just a matter of time for this issue to be decided by the courts."

Andrew Dvash-Banks was studying in Israel when he met his future husband, Elad, an Israeli citizen. Because they couldn't marry at the time in the U.S. or in Israel, they moved to Canada, where they wed in 2010. The children were born by a surrogate in September 2016.

Everything seemed fine until the couple brought their cranky infants to the American consulate in Toronto a few months later to apply for citizenship and the woman at the counter began asking probing questions they found shocking and humiliating.

The consular official told them she had the discretion to require a DNA test to show who the biological father was of each boy and without those tests neither son would get citizenship. The men knew that Andrew was Aiden's biological father and Elad was Ethan's but they had kept it a secret and had not planned on telling anyone.

"I started crying," Andrew Dvash-Banks said. "These are twins, how can you differentiate between them? They were born minutes apart."

After submitting the DNA test results that proved who fathered each boy, the couple received a large and small envelope from the U.S. on March 2. The big one included Aiden's passport. The other was a letter notifying Andrew that Ethan's application had been denied.

The family has since moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Andrew Dvash-Banks' family. Ethan came on a tourist visa that expired last month.

"He doesn't have legal status," Andrew Dvash-Banks said.

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