Published: 14 February 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The bill would pave the way for laws cancelling Israeli citizenship for terrorists’ families and increase confiscation of Palestinian land across the Green Line, say rights advocates.
As the Netanyahu government aims to hollow out Israel’s judiciary through Knesset legislation, Arab Israeli leaders are expecting that their constituents will be the citizens most harmed by the removal of Supreme Court oversight.
“This will definitely harm us more than Jewish citizens because it means taking off the last barrier giving a little bit of hope that some justice can be done,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, an MK from the predominantly Arab Hadash party told The Jewish Independent on Friday.
“Although the judicial system and Supreme Court hasn’t been very fair to us, still there was some hope that if things go bad, we can still approach the judicial system,” she said.
A potential blow to Arab Israelis was delivered on Sunday, two days after a mentally ill Palestinian man ploughed into a group of Israelis at an East Jerusalem bus stop, killing three people, including two children.
Riding public anger and fear over the attack, the cabinet committee on legislation endorsed a private bill by Likud MK Hanoch Milwidsky that would enable cancellation of the citizenship or the residency of family members of assailants so they can be deported “outside the state of Israel or the territories it rules,” Haaretz reported.
This would apply if the relative is determined to have had prior knowledge of the intention to carry out an attack, or supported it or praised it, the Haaretz report said.
The bill, which in the view of Arab leaders and rights groups paves the way for “collective punishments”, could be applied to Arab citizens or to residents of occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.
"Even though the court usually doesn’t protect Palestinians, the very fact that organisations know they have to explain their actions causes them sometimes not to do some things."
Roni Pelli, Association for Civil Rights in Israel
The government’s assault on the Supreme Court, if successful, could prevent a sustainable legal challenge to this bill and pave the way for even more damaging legislation.
Israel’s governmental system has no constitution that explicitly guarantees equality or upholds minority rights. To the extent that Arabs have been able to challenge racism in recent decades, it has been largely through the Supreme Court inferring equality on them based on liberal legislation such as the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, passed in 1992, which specifies that “Every human being is entitled to protection of his life, body and dignity”.
Still, the court has at times also failed to uphold equality, such as when it refused to consider petitions against the 2018 Nation State Law, which favours Jews and enshrines Jewish settlement as a national value.
Much of the concern from legal and human rights advocates is that the legislative overhaul, aimed at concentrating all power in the hands of Netanyahu and his allies, effectively negates the court’s power to buffer against discrimination or worse by invoking the human dignity law and other protections. This is because under the “reform”, a basic law can be voided or amended by a simple majority of the Knesset, which is now held by the far-Right coalition of Likud and its allies.
This majority, Arab leaders and Jewish liberals fear, will endanger the very status of Arab citizens and leave them open to persecution and far-reaching abuse in the name of security and Jewish primacy.
As for Palestinians in the West Bank, Roni Pelli, a lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, explains: “Even though the court usually doesn’t protect [the Palestinians], the very fact that [bodies] know they have to explain their actions causes them sometimes not to do some things.”
Pelli predicts widespread loss of privately-owned Palestinian land on the other side of the Green Line to settlers with the court out of the way, a major motivation within the coalition to support the legal overhaul. “Even in the minimum instances where rights are protected, this protection will be removed,” she says.
“There is no other place to protect their rights. Palestinians don’t even have the right to demonstrate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
"It is enough to punish people for what they did with what the court decides. But why strip their citizenship and deport them?"
Talya Sasson, former State attorney
Other Likud draft legislation, which passed first reading by a vote of 89-8 two weeks ago, would enable the stripping of citizenship and deportation to Palestinian self-rule areas of someone serving time for what is defined as a terrorism offence who receives payment from the Palestinian Authority. The PA regularly pays compensation to perpetrators of attacks and their families in what is termed by critics as a “pay for slay” policy. The PA insists it is merely a form of social welfare.
Passed just days after the devastating Palestinian attack in East Jerusalem that took the lives of seven Israelis, the bill was promoted by the Likud as a security measure and gained the support not only of other coalition partners but of all of the Zionist opposition parties.
“Deterrence is the most important thing in preventing attacks and further bloodshed, along with immediate punishment as much as possible,” Sharen Haskel, of the National Unity Party, said in supporting the proposal, according to a Knesset press release.
Likud coalition chairman Haim Katz, proclaimed: “Today we are changing the equation.” Referring to the opposition of Arab MKs, he added: “Anyone who votes against the law is a supporter of terrorism.”
The proposed law also delineates a similar process for stripping East Jerusalem Palestinians of their residency rights and deporting them to the PA areas.
The erosion of Arab citizenship status has already begun, according to advocates including former state attorney Talya Sasson, Arab leaders and Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, based in Haifa.
Sasson termed the bill “illegal” and “unjust” in remarks to The Jewish Independent. “It is enough to punish people for what they did with what the court decides. But why strip their citizenship and deport them?
“It means that Israeli citizenship is a very weak citizenship, something that’s easy to be taken. I don’t know why they passed something that violates international law. Of course it can expand. Tomorrow it may be someone else,” Sasson said.
Labor Party spokesman Jonathan Cummings declined to comment on the proposed bill, a sign of how strongly security arguments resonate today. In effect, even the left-wing Labor party is thus far supporting a measure that may one day be looked back upon as a first step towards deportations based on ethnicity.
Salam Irsheid, a lawyer at Adalah, said the bill would impact Arabs only. “We are seeing a different legal measure and a different punishment for Arabs. It’s a kind of apartheid, a new law targeting people on the basis of race.”
The bill, she added, contravenes the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed but did not ratify.
Jessica Montell, director of the HaMoked human rights group in East Jerusalem, says deportation of residents of East Jerusalem, part of an occupied territory, would be a “war crime” that violates the Fourth Geneva Convention’s ban on forcible transfer.
“This government has all sorts of threats around loyalty,” Montell said last week. “This law in and of itself is not going to bring about deportations of thousands of people but it opens the door to additional measures that could affect large numbers of people.”
With Sunday’s ministerial decision, it seems that Montell’s warning may be worthy of serious consideration. Likud MK Eliyahu Revivo, reflecting broader sentiment in his party, supports the stripping of citizenship and expulsion of family members of those perpetrating attacks in order to achieve “deterrence”, his spokesman Eden Bitkover told The Jewish Independent last week.
“According to the recommendations of the Shin Bet, harming the family deters and causes [the assailant] to think again before murdering Jews. We think and hope the number of attacks will go down,” Bitkover said.
"This will definitely harm us more than Jewish citizens because it means taking off the last barrier giving a little bit of hope that some justice can be done."
Aida Touma-Suleiman, Hadash MK
Touma-Suleiman, however, terms this approach “a collective punishment and revenge steps. You don’t punish their families. That’s stupid and racist. This just brings more despair. People in despair are very dangerous.”
Irsheid, the Adalah attorney, adds that merely raising the deportation idea is a cause for extreme concern. “Regardless of whether the recent bills that wish to further extend the illegal revocation of citizenship on family members will ever pass, they are testament to a dangerous political climate.
“We identify a clear escalation in the efforts to legitimise both deportation and collective punishment, all as part of entrenching two separate and racially divided political systems.”
Yousef Jabareen, who teaches human rights law at Haifa University and is a former Hadash MK, stresses that the weakening of the Supreme Court and harming the status of Arabs are intrinsically related. “I can see the connection between limiting the courts and planning to adopt further laws curtailing human rights on both sides of the Green Line,” he said.
In Touma-Suleiman’s view, the fate of entire Bedouin villages in the southern Negev region that are unrecognised due to discriminatory state policies may now be completely at the mercy of extremist politicians.
“The coalition members have agreed on plans for greater Judaization of the Galilee and Negev. This could mean targeting unrecognised villages, intensifying house demolitions, moving people and taking their lands. None of this will be challenged by the legal system if that reform passes.”
A key driver of the judicial overhaul, Simcha Rothman, the Religious Zionism MK who is an illegal settler in the West Bank and chairman of the Knesset judiciary committee, said last week that the Knesset “is entitled” to be able to institute any legislation that it likes, implying that there should be no judicial review of legislation in Israel.
With such an approach dictating decision-making, Touma-Suleiman believes there is a real possibility that Israel will end up deporting “significant” numbers of Palestinians, something National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed to do during the election campaign to “disloyal” citizens.
“Just use your imagination to think about what will happen,” she said. “These are fanatics and they can decide whatever they want to do.”
Photo: Palestinian farmer Abdul Dayem Hammad, whose crops were destroyed by settlers in September 2021 (Arik Asherman)
