A ban in force since 2003 on Arab citizens and residents of Israel extending their rights to their Palestinian spouses came to an end yesterday after lawmakers failed to extend the controversial measure.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s request to prolong the ban had divided his disparate coalition, with both Jewish left-wingers and Arab conservatives strongly opposed.
In a vote early yesterday, parliament tied 59 votes to 59, meaning the measure lapsed.
Photo: AFP
The outcome underlined the wafer-thin majority Bennett’s coalition commands in the 120-seat parliament. The eight parties in the coalition were united by little but their shared enmity to opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whom they unseated as prime minister last month after a record 12 straight years in power.
The ban first enacted during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, had been justified by supporters on security grounds, but critics derided it as a discriminatory measure targeting Israel’s Arab minority. It has caused endless complications for Palestinians living across Israel and the territories it has occupied since 1967. A substantial number of those affected live in annexed east Jerusalem and therefore have Israeli residency, without necessarily being citizens of the Jewish state.
In a protest against the measure outside parliament on Monday, some recounted the hardships of seeking permits to join their spouses, or the risks of entering Israeli territory without permission.
Ali Meteb said his wife not having Israeli residency rights had confined his family to a “continuous prison.”
“I am asking for rights that the state owes us ... for my wife to have Israeli ID, residency rights and freedom of movement,” he said.
Jessica Montell, head of Hamoked, an Israeli human rights group that provides legal services to Palestinians, said “tens of thousands of families are harmed by this law.”
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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