Beyond Apartheid

Israel's decision to force all prospective Israeli citizens to
declare loyalty to "a Jewish and democratic state" is not only racist,
but designed to further institutionalise the dispossession of
Palestinians.

It is ironic that the oath should include the term democracy as the law itself is a blatant exercise in state coercion.

As Adalah, a legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, puts
it, the new amendment "requires all non-Jews to identify with Zionism
and imposes a political ideology and loyalty to the principles or
Judaism and Zionism".

Targeting intermarriage

In practice, the amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel
Law - which requires that Jews and non-Jews applying for citizenship
endorse the ideology of the state - is mainly aimed at Palestinians
married to Israeli Arabs.

Israeli-Arabs constitute 20 per cent of the Israeli population. The
majority are Muslim but there is also a strong Christian contingent. The
purpose of the law is not to impose Judaism but the Jewishness of the
state - which in practical terms excludes Arabs and legitimises their
expulsion.

The cabinet also renewed other restrictions passed in 2005 - the law
has been renewed annually since then - which make it difficult for
Palestinians to obtain Israeli citizenship.

This part of the
citizenship law stops Palestinians married to Israelis from living with
them - thus separating thousands of families.

Such marriages are
largely between Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel, so this law
would effectively discourage marriages between Palestinians from the
Occupied Territories and those living inside Israel.

Israel's Palestinian minority today are those who stayed in their
homes after the creation of Israel in 1948 and their descendents. But
when Israel occupied the remaining territories of historic Palestine in
the 1967 war, the dispersed Palestinians were able to reconnect and
intermarriages ensued.

However, the law bars Palestinians married
to Israelis from joining their families inside Israel until the
interior ministry has granted them permission to reside in the country.
The law also denies residency rights to any foreign spouse or his
children if he is married to other women in addition to his Israeli
wife. And it requires that Palestinians seeking Israeli citizenship
provide financial guarantees and proof that they have a home in Israel.

Israel
has also made it difficult - and at times, impossible - for Arabs or
any non-Israelis to reside with their Palestinian spouses in the West
Bank in order to force the latter group to leave.

Sacred security cow

Israeli advocates of the amendment cite security issues as a
justification and argue that the new oath will discourage Arab citizens
of Israel from taking part in attacks or actions against Israel.

The explanatory notes accompanying the proposed restrictions state
that their purpose is to make it harder for Palestinian terrorist groups
to recruit Palestinians who have acquired Israeli citizenship to carry
out attacks.

"An examination of the security reality since the outbreak of armed
confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians revealed growing
involvement by Palestinians who took advantage of their status in
Israel, received on the basis of their family reunification process with
Israelis, to become involved in terrorism and abet suicide bombing
attacks," the notes said.

"The Israeli identity cards granted to [these] Palestinians provided
them with freedom of movement between Israel and the [Palestinian]
Authority and thus made them into the terrorist organisations' preferred
population for carrying out hostile actions in general and inside
Israel in particular."

The claim that there are Israeli-Arabs who have used their
citizenship to engage in or facilitate attacks inside Israel may be
true, but the solution is to be found in addressing the root cause of
the conflict - the dispossession of the Palestinians - and not in
institutionalising "ethnic cleansing".

Taking an oath will not prevent an alienated citizen - whether Jewish
or not - from protesting against the government or even committing
violent acts. But as so often with Israel's arbitrary laws and actions,
the sacred cow of security concerns is being held aloft.

Another brick

All evictions of Palestinians - whether
through the demolition of homes, deportations or the confiscation of
lands - are committed under the guise of Israel's security needs. But
their aim is, in fact, to maintain a Jewish majority and to reduce - and
if this continues, potentially end - the presence of Palestinians in
both Israel proper and the Occupied Territories.

The cabinet has
turned the loyalty oath not only into a tool for the subversion of
Palestinians, but also into a vehicle for the continued eviction of
Palestinians from their homeland.

Editors of the Israeli daily Haaretz, who urged the
government not to pass the law, have unequivocally rejected the security
rationale. "The wording of the initiative perpetuates the lie that
these measures are required by security considerations, when in truth
they are clearly driven by demographic concerns," said an editorialpublished prior the decision's ratification.

In Israel proper, the government has systematically employed
discrimination - and since the 1970s the confiscation of land - to
strangle major Arab cities and encircle them with Jewish settlements to
prevent them from expanding outwards as any city would as a result of
natural growth.

There has always been talk, mainly but not
exclusively among right-wing Israeli politicians, of the need to
'transfer' - a euphemism for expel - the country's Arab minority to the
West Bank or even to Arab countries.

This talk was renewed when
the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party secured third place in the
country's 2009 election and joined a coalition government led by
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister.

Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beiteinu's leader, himself a Russian
immigrant, started to aggressively advocate 'transferring' the country's
Arab minority so as to maintain a Jewish majority and the Jewishness of
the state.

Yisrael Beiteinu has been the driving force behind the demand that
non-Jews declare loyalty to a Jewish state and the draft amendment to
the citizenship law, approved by the cabinet last Sunday, was a watered
down version of an earlier Yisrael Beiteinu initiative to expel Arabs
who do not do so.

But the Knesset, facing opposition and fearing an international
backlash, chose to make the law a more subtle but equally threatening
tool with which to intimidate Arabs into leaving.

The amended law is another brick in the apartheid system that Israel
has built. But the main problem in Israel is not apartheid but the
systemic colonisation and dispossession of Arabs. And apartheid in the
case of Israel is a tool - not an aim in itself - to complete the
expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.