The Israeli Parliament renewed, Thursday, March 10, the prohibition of the naturalization of the spouses of Israelis originating from countries considered as enemies. This so-called “citizenship” law mainly affects thousands of Palestinian couples, one of whose members comes from the West Bank or Gaza. It had been suspended in July 2021, due to the parliamentary vagueness which had followed the formation of the new government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Passed urgently in 2003 in the heart of the second Intifada for a period of one year, this text is officially presented as a security law, aimed at avoiding giving the freedom of movement conferred by Israeli citizenship to potential terrorists. Renewed every year, it quickly took on an ethnocentric character. “It is a tool to ensure that Israel remains a majority Jewish country,” even declared the centrist Yaïr Lapid, foreign minister of the current government, in July 2021.
In July, during the annual renewal of this legislation, the Likud – the party of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, ousted from the coalition – and its ultra-Orthodox and religious ultra-nationalist partners had gone against their own ideological line and had voted against the text. They had justified their decision by claiming that the government, based on a motley coalition of right, left and an Arab party, was itself a danger to Israel, and that bringing it down was a Zionist duty.
Thursday, this unlikely window closed, just before the spring parliamentary truce. The right wing of the executive, led by the Minister of the Interior, Ayelet Shaked, had conducted intense negotiations with his brother enemies of the opposition. After the vote, she tweeted that it was the victory of the concept “of a Jewish and democratic state on that of a state for all its citizens”, watchword of most Arab Israeli parties.
Multiple bureaucratic discriminations
It is above all a political victory for the right-wing figures in the coalition, who thus consolidate their position. By succeeding in putting the pieces back together with the Likud, “Shaked and [le premier ministre] Naftali Bennett also send a message to left-wing parties: ‘we don’t need you'”, analyzes Aïda Touma-Suleiman, deputy of the United Arab List, an opposition party. Despite this snub, the coalition holds: no one on the left has slammed the door, despite unanimous opposition to the law. “They all have too much to lose” regret M.me Touma-Suleiman.
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