Separating Palestinian Families By Rima Merriman

Separating Palestinian Families

By Rima Merriman

Jordan Times, Thursday, June 29, 2006

Israel’s policies of controlling, containing and shaping Palestinian demographics for its own benefit and to the utter detriment of Palestinians are longstanding. The damage thus inflicted on the social and emotional fabric of Palestinian lives over the decades has been incalculable.

That family cohesion is still the strongest bond holding Palestinians together is a testament to enduring cultural values and a powerful yearning for connection with their homelands. But decades of Israeli manipulations and assaults, most recently in the shape of the wall and hundreds of checkpoints, are seriously fraying these bonds.

Israel is spending millions on separating its illegal settlements in the West Bank, which are designed to choke the growth of Palestinian population centres, but it is also careful to connect them to Israel by state-of-the-art highways, lest they should feel isolated from their culture. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are left to take roundabout ways to get from one point to another on terrible, ancient roads. They are being imprisoned, literally, in smaller and smaller communities, thus intensifying their clan interests over their national ones, among other ill effects.

In annexed East Jerusalem, for example, where the Israelis have absolute control over Palestinian lives, the youngest generation is growing up alienated from the rest of the West Bank, with grave and well-documented psychosocial repercussions.

The Israelis also have absolute authority over borders. They are making sure that Palestinian separation and isolation, not just from the rest of the world, but also one family member from another, is taken to a high art.

Recently, Israelis have started demanding that Palestinian expatriate nationals, as well as other internationals who wish to work in the West Bank, obtain work permits from the Israeli authority, but in a Catch 22 situation, they provide no mechanism for people to do so. In other words, it is not clear how applications are to be made and from where (inside or outside the occupied Palestinian territories), what criteria they will use to grant such visas and how long the process takes.

The Zionist tactics used in this recent intensification of the policy of separation and isolation are not new. Israel’s policy has always been not to repatriate refugees or to unify families separated by war. There are 276,000 Arab villagers in the north of Israel who are displaced from their homes to this day. The rest of the Israeli Palestinians (almost 20 per cent of the population) have lived under discrimination, isolated in specific areas, mostly in the north, and choked off geographically by Jewish settlements in the very same pattern that Israel is following today in the occupied territories.

The short-lived 1967 war produced its share of refugees, separating yet more families. Israeli pressures (including economic pressures) and expulsions have continued systematically, following an explicit policy of keeping as few Palestinians as possible in the Jewish state and also in the “closed” territories it occupies. Hence the so-called “Nationality and Entry into Israel Law”, passed by the Knesset in 2003, which effectively bans marriages between Israeli citizens and residents from the occupied territories. Incredibly, this law’s constitutionality was upheld by the Israeli High Court of Justice recently.

The same policy of separation of spouses is applied to Palestinian residents of the occupied territories who are married to Palestinian non-residents (i.e., nationals of other countries). Israel does not allow unification. For years, it has forced non-resident spouses to shuttle in and out of the occupied territories on tourist visas. And these were the lucky ones — the ones whose spouses held the nationality of a Western country. Others were granted long-term visitor’s permits, but arbitrarily so and after intense activity by human rights organisations.

Now Israel is cracking down even more and has started treating spouses who are holders of Western nationalities the same way it treats spouses who are holders of Jordanian passports: it will allow them entry into the occupied territories briefly once a year, if that.

Given the large numbers of refugees and of Palestinian expatriate nationals, and given their continued connection with their land of origin, whether emotional or material, and their continued desire to stay connected, marriage between occupied territories residents and non-residents is widespread. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been compelled to live apart from their spouses, and that also means thousands of children forced to live apart from one parent.

As far as Israel is concerned, the only solution for this is for the spouse holding the occupied territories residency to abandon his home and his parents and to go live outside the territories — the more room for Jewish settlers to take their place. Not only does Israel have no objections whatsoever against Israeli citizens (provided they are Jewish) who wish to settle on the West Bank, it also gives them incentives to do so.

The emotional and physical hardships inflicted on the Palestinians over the years as a result of this policy of non-unification cannot even be ascribed to security measures.

Israel has simply never recognised the right of Palestinians in the occupied territories to family unification, basing its actions in that regard purely on political considerations. Other than an allowance for a limited number of war refugees between 1967 and 1973, and a strict quota between 1993 and 1995, Israel’s policy has been rigidly anti-unification.

In 1992, the argument presented by the military government to the Israeli High Court of Justice rested on the following tenet: “Family unification in the occupied territories is not a vested right, nor is it an acquired personal right whose fulfillment may be demanded at any time.”

Thus, the argument goes on: “It is not acceptable that any male resident of one of the regions who so desires may marry a woman from abroad and bring her into the region, or that every female resident may marry a foreign resident and bring him into the region. The decision of who enters and who settles in one of the regions (Judea and Samaria or the Gaza Strip) is a decision to be made by the authorities, and no resident, male or female, may compel the authorities to accept his or her private determination in this matter.” (See Hamoked, Centre for the Defence of the Individual in Israel.)

The policy is a clear violation of human rights. Residents of the occupied territories have the same relationship to their occupied homeland as any citizen does to his country. They have a right to a normal pattern of family life which Israel should not be allowed to deny.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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