By IPS Correspondents
JERUSALEM, Aug 2 2003 (IPS)

If Rawda Masarwa and her husband Khaled want to live together under the same roof like any regular married couple, they will either have to break the law or leave the country. If neither option is acceptable to them, they do have one other alternative – to separate.

Their impossible predicament is the product of new legislation introduced by the Israeli government July 31. The law prevents Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who have married Israeli citizens – the vast majority of them Arabs – from getting citizenship or residency status in the Jewish state.

"There’s only one word to describe this law – racist," says Masarwa, 28, who comes from the Israeli Arab village Taibeh in the north of the country. She lives there with Khaled who is from the West Bank city Tul Karm.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asks. "Separate from my husband? We have two small children. How can they grow up without a father?"

The right-wing Israeli government, which fast-tracked the legislation through parliament, defends the law on security grounds. It says a number of Palestinians who have been given residency status have exploited the freedom of movement this gives them, and carried out terror attacks.

But human rights groups in Israel and abroad, and left-wing politicians see the law as a radical solution to a marginal problem, and as blatant discrimination. It will affect thousands of couples and their children already living in Israel, and waiting for their request for family unification, as the procedure is known, to be processed.

It will also affect future marriages between Israeli Arabs – they make up 20 percent of Israel’s population of six million – and Palestinians from the territories.

The law seeks to legitimise a situation that has been in effect since mid-2002, when the government blocked residency for Palestinians who marry Israelis. Many Arab families have been separated as a result of the wars in the region, with some remaining inside Israel proper and others ending up in the West Bank. Marriage between people from these two groups is not uncommon.

"This law is specifically aimed at Israelis married to Palestinians," Yoav Loeff, spokesperson for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) told IPS. "An Israeli who marries a Swede, for instance, will be able to submit a request for their spouse to begin residency proceedings. But not an Israeli who is married to someone from the West Bank. This is an extremely black day for Israeli democracy."

Amnesty International calls the legislation a violation of "international human rights law, and treaties which Israel has ratified and pledged to uphold."

But Israeli minister without portfolio Gideon Ezra who says more than 100,000 Palestinians have obtained residency permits in Israel since 1993, argues that security is paramount. "Since September 2000 (when the Intifadah erupted) we have seen a significant connection in terror attacks between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs," he says.

The government says there have been 20 such cases. Israeli civil rights activists question that figure. "When we first asked for numbers, they said it was impossible to give them to us," says Loeff. "Then they somehow managed to find 20 cases."

They also question Ezra’s figure of 100,000 residency permits. Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says only 24,000 such requests have been made since 1993, and it is not clear how many have been granted.

Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, a member of the Shinui party which claims to champion civil liberties, is uneasy with the new law. "I wish we didn’t need this law," he says. "I’m not thrilled with it. But there was a government decision and I must follow it." His ministry, which is in charge of issues of personal status, will implement the law.

Head of the Interior Minister’s office Tibi Rabinovitch told IPS that the Prime Minister’s office had initiated the legislation. When pressed on the matter, he says the law will only be in effect for a year and will then have to be extended by parliament. "If there is progress in the peace process, then the law won’t be necessary any more," he says.

That is cold comfort for Rawda Masarwa. Ever since she married five years ago, she says her husband Khaled has had to renew the permit that allows him to live with her in Israel every six months.

"Every time I go (to the Interior Ministry) they ask me for more documents," she told IPS. "There’s always something new that they want. I now have a file that is bursting with documents."

Khaled’s most recent permit has expired and the Israeli authorities have not renewed it for several months, meaning he is now in the country illegally.

"We never go out together," says Rawda, who works as an accounting clerk in the Israeli coastal city Netanya. "There have been cases where the security forces took people and sent them back to the territories. I don’t want to take that chance. After our second child was born I told Khaled not to come to the hospital to see us. I was scared he might be caught and sent back to Tul Karm. I would have been left alone with a newborn child."

Many civil rights activists and some leftist politicians believe the true motivation for the law is demographic – Israel’s fear that a continued influx of Palestinians will whittle away at the state’s Jewish majority. "This law has no connection with security," says Israeli Arab MP Azmi Bishara. "It is tied to demography. They want to limit the number of Arabs in Israel."

Some Israeli jurists question the constitutionality of the law, which they say contradicts the basic values of the state like equality before the law for all citizens, Jew and Arab alike.

Human rights organisations plan to go to the High Court in a bid to have the law annulled. "We are already drafting a petition," says Tibi.

Masarwa wants her name on that petition. "I will fight this to the end. I am not prepared to sit with my arms folded. I’ve had enough of living in fear. I want to live like a normal human being."

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