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Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

reuters.com

561–570 of 735 posts

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arabs are not "brown". GJ on unintentional racism

I don't see the profit in trying to catch them on a small and clearly not meaningful technicality in their phrasing. Genuine question, do you truly feel the commenter is a racist, and you just stepped in and called them out successfully? What seems much more likely is that they, in their sarcasm, were doing an imitation of an ignorant conservative stereotype by focusing on skin color and grouping all middle easterner…

Bingo. Esp considering I'm middle eastern.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Black September (Palestinian-Jordan war in 1970) and the bombings in Amman, the Palestinian state is definitely not an extension of Jordan. Even if there is a number of Palestinians living in Jordan, they are not Jordanians. That makes that view quite wrong.

I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying that this law needs to be viewed in the lens of national conflict rather than racism. The Israeli right wing does in fact consider the Palestinians in the West Bank Jordanian or generally “Arab” even though Jordan and the Palestinians themselves may not.

Also, in reference to Black September, the whole point of the Black September war was that the Palestinians considered themselves the rightful rulers of Jordan/Palestine rather than the British-installed Hashemite monarchy, and Israel has no contention to this, besides that the monarchy is not inclined to war with Israel. Still, “Palestinians living in Jordan” to them _are_ Jordanians, and Jordan is in fact the Palestinian state, which was the whole point of the British partition. The British making awful partition plans is not unique to the Levant, by the way.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#563

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Ah yes, the Arab hivemind sub plot to take over your country with little brown babies overtaking precious white ones. I, too, get concerned of the explosion of disgusting brown people that threatens my beautiful non Arabic speaking country. /s if not clear.

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Yes I would be okay in the hypothetical situation you've constructed, with loaded language and fear tactics.

I would also be fine with publicly shaming view points like yours and getting you fired from your job for being completely xenophobic. I can't imagine how you view your middle eastern coworkers who you've decided hate women and shit?

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#564
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel has many laws dictating where you can live and between which areas you can travel, and they depend on its complicated notion of citizenship and nationality. You have far fewer restrictions as a "Jewish nationality, Israeli citizen" than as "any other kind of nationality, Israeli citizen". This is the meaningful difference people are referring to when they say that "Israel is an ethnostate" or talk about "apart…

Can you provide an example of what restrictions non-Jewish Israeli citizens have? Because I’m pretty sure all Israeli citizens have the same rights (Al Aqsa mosque and other religious sites notwithstanding).

TFA is in practice an example, no? An Arab Israeli cannot marry and live with an Arab from occupied territory just "next door" (their affinity group), but a Jewish Israeli can marry from their affinity group and live anywhere (laws on marriage within Israel are restrictive and often prevent even Jews from marrying other Jews if they are not deemed officially Jewish, I think through matrilinear heredity, but if you are Jewish you can freely travel and marry outside the state and travel back to Israel and have the marriage legally recognized in full).

You might argue that technically this is targeting non-citzens and is therefore not affecting Israeli citizens of any nationality. But to me this is clearly targeted at limiting the normal actions of one group of citizens, while there are other laws to expand and accelerate analogous actions by another group of citizens. There are tens of thousands of Arab Israelis who have been married to non-Israeli Palestinians since 2003 when this law first went into place (the new law is just a law that regularizes a "temporary" "security" law that was renewed yearly until it surprisingly did not get support for yearly renewal in 2021). Those tens of thousands of families are in a very precarious situation, with a spouse with very limited rights to movement, and no rights at all if their Israeli citizen spouse were to die, etc. -- they would be deported (and I believe many have been).

Edit: Israel's interior minister has referred to the law's purpose in a way that shows the purpose is also to discriminate against the Arab Israelis and their ability to get married and have a normal family life: "we don’t need to mince words, the law also has demographic reasons": https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/shaked-family-unificatio...

As for more specific and direct examples, it is legal for the Jewish National Fund to refuse to sell or lease land to non-Jewish national Israelis (i.e., mostly Arab Israelis). The JNF is not public, but it owns a substantial percentage of Israeli land, about 13%, and I don't have information to hand, but I believe there are other bodies with similar practices that administer the majority of Israeli land in this way -- that's a hazy memory though, and I don't have time to research it again, so I wouldn't rely on it.

The Admissions Committees Law also allows for town committees to deny the right of Israelis to buy/lease land/property if they are deemed "unsuitable to the social life of the community [...] or the social and cultural fabric of the town", and allows for the cultural fabric of the town to be based on "special characteristics", such as defining themselves as having a "Zionist vision". This further means non-Zionist citizens are barred -- of course, many Jews in the world are non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist, but I don't think it's jumping to conclusions to infer based on the cultural backdrop that this is primarily a means to exclude non-Jewish nationals.

I think those two are specific examples of "legal" discrimination directly on the basis of non-Jewish nationality.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#565
post #433

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.037% terrorism sounds high to me

That a 0.37% (or more) slice of some population that feels it's been oppressed and impoverished might engage in /(freedom fighter|terrorist)/ activities doesn't seem surprising to me.

No post body was provided.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arabs are not "brown". GJ on unintentional racism

I don't see the profit in trying to catch them on a small and clearly not meaningful technicality in their phrasing. Genuine question, do you truly feel the commenter is a racist, and you just stepped in and called them out successfully? What seems much more likely is that they, in their sarcasm, were doing an imitation of an ignorant conservative stereotype by focusing on skin color and grouping all middle easterner…

This "brown people" phrase is commonly used to disparage concerns about incompatible values and cultural norms. And this is probably only context where I see middle easterners grouped like this.

Not GP, but I do consider this to be low-key racist and aaomidi to be somewhat racist, but maybe for different reason than GP.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question coming from a place of relative ignorance- are Jewish people today more persecuted in western democracies like the US than in Israel? There are certainly attacks, but I don't know how that compares to the sustained state of quasi-war that Israel exists in. > Laws like these lower the probability of Jews becoming a minority in Israel. Do you think the probability of them becoming a minority is zero? A…

> Serious question coming from a place of relative ignorance- are Jewish people today more persecuted in western democracies like the US than in Israel? There are certainly attacks, but I don't know how that compares to the sustained state of quasi-war that Israel exists in. Just by the numbers, Jews are better off in Israel, because baseline violent crime rates are actually lower in Israel. This is made starker by t…

Fewer than 1 in 400 homicide victims in the US is killed in a mass shooting. Conflating the danger from baseline violent crime rate with that from mass shootings is silly.

And of course, the violence in the USA is extremely unevenly distributed, so the baseline number tells you very little about the actual danger to Jewish Americans.

I don't know the answer to the GP's question one way or another, but this line of reasoning doesn't answer it.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#569

First of all, this isn't a ban on Israeli-Palestinian marriage, this is a restriction on the ability to gain citizenship through those marriages. I don't agree with that, but I do think it's important to clarify. Regarding comments I'm seeing here saying Israel is an apartheid state or that Israel is racist or that Israel the concept of a Jewish state is disgusting: Israel is the size of New Jersey. It is the only st…

Was this even an argument? it felt more like "We should have a Jewish state because we can and there nothing anyone can do about it, if you are not Jewish go fuck yourself. "

History has nothing to do what is happening today. You are just trying to drive the narrative anyway you can.

Re: Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? The fact that an uprising involves terroristic tactics does not make it less of an uprising. Trying to prevent people from calling the Intifada an uprising (which is the literal translation of the word) is playing word-games for rhetorical points, not discussing reality.

I’m talking about drawing a false romantic narrative of an uprising of the people, when the reality is it’s just terror. Lets call it a Terroristic Uprising, more suiting.

I will repeat what I said, which is that this is rhetorical point-scoring, not discussion of reality. It's not helpful. Everyone with two neurons to rub together understands that both the Palestinians and the Israelis have engaged in terror against one another over the course of a century of inter-ethnic conflict.
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