Physicians for Human Rights Israel petitioned the high court of justice because we cannot let a law enshrining wrongful discrimination between the country’s Jewish and Arab citizens stand. The Citizenship Law violates a slew of fundamental rights, separates spouses, tears apart children and parents and subverts the values of democracy.
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In a petition filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual and PHRI, Physicians for Human Rights Israel presented our clear stance – there is no justification, not even on security grounds, for denying people who were permitted to remain in Israel and have, for all intents and purposes, become residents of the country their social rights, preventing their access to public healthcare and welfare and housing services, limiting their employment and income possibilities, withholding access to legal aid and more.
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Physicians for Human Rights Israel petition, which focuses on two groups the Citizenship Law makes particularly vulnerable: women and children, stresses that a woman who has a temporary stay permit or temporary status is at the bottom of the social ladder. Her status in Israel depends on her spouse and her relationship with him. This means women often choose to stay in an unsafe relationship, or with a violent spouse, holding on so they can complete a process that has no prospect of ending, in the hopes of ultimately getting permanent status. In our experience, Palestinian women affected by the law may have trouble leaving an abusive and violent relationship because doing so puts them at risk of losing their status and sometimes their children, as they may be deported without them.
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As for children, the petition clarifies that children who have no residency grow up to be adults who have none of the rights and freedoms to which residents are entitled: social rights, access to higher education, employment opportunities, the ability to drive, housing assistance and more. All this means that these children, who grow up into adulthood in Israel, know from a very young age that the law does not allow them to live a full human life and tell their life’s story. As talented as they may be, they are tracked into a life of constriction, bereft of possibilities, and condemned by law to hardship, poverty and distress.
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The Knesset had an opportunity to do away with this law – the Citizenship Law – a racist, discriminatory statute that treats all Palestinians, no matter who they are, as a security threat without individual screening. Instead, members of Israel’s parliament chose to re-enshrine arrangements that deliberately violate human rights and set out to harm people with no connection whatsoever to security needs.

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