I am a Jerusalemite By Tom Segev
Haaretz 11th February 2006 Somewhere in the clauses of the new law for the prevention of family unification lies the intention to expel thousands of children from East Jerusalem when they reach the age of 18. Amal Abu Jawila is already 16 - she has just two years to go. It's a very complicated story, ostensibly all a legal and administrative tangle, but its human and political essence is very simple: Almost 40 years after Israel conquered and annexed East Jerusalem, it is showing clear signs of remorse. The national ethos still holds sacred the "eternal unity of Jerusalem," but, unfortunately, Jerusalem is full of Arabs. To reduce their number, the government has proposed a law to prevent family unification, a law that threatens to lead to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinian children from Jerusalem, a bureaucratic transfer in the spirit of Avigdor Lieberman. Four of Mirfat Abu Jawila's seven children would be due for expulsion; the Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the law next week. The main purpose of the law, which has been in the works for the past three years, is to limit seriously the ability of Palestinian citizens to obtain Israeli citizenship by means of marriage with Israeli citizens. Much has already been said and written about this law. Now it appears that also hidden somewhere in its sections and subsections is the possibility of preventing thousands of children who are residents of Jerusalem from staying in Israel after they turn 18; obviously, they will have to move to Palestinian Authority territory. Some were born in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where their lives are centered. It's where their parents live. There are people, Jerusalem residents, who lived for some time with their relatives in the West Bank, usually immediately after marriage - a woman with her husband's parents or vice versa, and when the children were born, they registered them there, assuming that Israel would also recognize them as residents of Jerusalem. Up until three years ago, the state did agree to register children who had only one parent who was a Jerusalem resident, even if the children were born in the territories. However, the East Jerusalem branch of the Interior Ministry did not provide genuine service: People were forced to wait in line for entire days, in the sun and rain, in unbearably crowded conditions, and those who finally did get to see a clerk there were usually sent away to bring more documents and then had to go back to the end of the line. Many people therefore preferred to register their children in the territories. The registration of children who were born in the territories, or who had one parent who was not a resident of Jerusalem, involved a process of "family unification." In the spirit of the new law, this process ceased. Beginning at the end of last year, children up to the age of 14 could reside in Jerusalem with their parents on the basis of temporary permits that entitle them to a National Insurance Institute allowance and national health insurance. Children ages 14-18 can reside in Israel on the basis of military permits, without social privileges. And this is not an automatic process: It is all subject to the approval of the Shin Bet. All it takes is a claim that someone related to the family - a brother, brother-in-law, uncle or so on - may harm national security in the future in order to deprive the child of the right to reside in Jerusalem. An entire city, including every child, is thus suspected of terror. Naturally, the ones harmed are not entitled to receive detailed information about the substance of the claims that the Shin Bet raises against them, and thus they have no basis on which to stake an appeal. Without transparency and oversight, one is left with any recourse but to have faith that not one of the Shin Bet people is exploiting his unlimited authority for the purposes of blackmail, bribery and so on. In any event, there is no legal possibility of extending the residency permits and so at age 18, the children must bid their parents good-bye and leave. Soon it will be Amal Abu Jawila's turn; she is already 16. Her mother, Mirfat Abu Jawila, a Jerusalem native and city resident who works as a caregiver for the elderly, married a resident of Ramallah in 1988, who is currently a maintenance worker at a maternity hospital. Four of their children were born in Ramallah - three sons and one daughter, Amal; another three girls were born in Jerusalem. Officially, then, Amal is an illegal resident. When she tried to accompany her mother on a shopping trip outside the neighborhood or on a family visit, she was detained for a long time by soldiers. They told her to return home and also threatened to expel her. Her brother Kamal, 15, could not join his classmates on their annual field trip because he does not have a residency permit. In three more years, he, too, will have to leave his parents' home and move to the territories. Meanwhile, these four children do not entitle their parents to an NII allowance, nor do they have national health insurance. This is one of the law's objectives. The possibility of expelling thousands of children from Jerusalem received the Knesset's seal of approval; it was all justified by the need to protect against terror. The state's response to the petitions that will come up for a hearing next week in the Supreme Court is also based exclusively on security needs. But attorney Adi Lustigman, who is representing Moked: The Center for the Defense of the Individual, obtained a computer presentation that people from the Population Administration showed the government ministers before the latter decided on the law. The need to defend the state from terror was just one rationale. The Population Administration representatives also spoke about money and about the danger that the Arabs will multiply. "How much are the child allowances alone (emphasis in the original) costing us?" reads one page of the presentation that the ministers saw. And another says: "Six children were registered as citizens by virtue of birth to a mother to whom citizenship was restored but who has continued to reside in the territories after the acquisition of this status. The result is she has about NIS 92,000 from the NII and an Israeli citizen son who blows himself up in the Matza restaurant in Haifa." The presentation warned the ministers of "an immediate and concrete danger" - not only terror, but the danger that Israel might lose its character as a "Jewish and democratic" state. Several pages of the presentation bore jokey headings clearly meant to amuse the ministers, such as "A Friend Brings a Friend." The explanation: "A husband acquires residency status due to marriage; he marries a second woman from the territories (he's a polygamist), divorces the Israeli woman and requests family unification for the foreign woman and her children." The High Court hearing is, of course, full of legal-bureaucratic language. Attorney Yocheved Gensin, of the State Prosecutor's Office, wrote, among other things: "The petitioners have not laid sufficient evidentiary groundwork for their claim regarding consequential discrimination. However, even if a basis were laid for consequential discrimination, and we do not believe it has been, the existence of an objective justification for differentiality in treatment, undoes the argument of harm ... In the case at hand, there exists an objective justification based on the professional assessment of security officials, as described above." If the justices give attorney Lustigman's arguments a thorough reading, they'll find some human language in it: "The injustice and disgrace with which this law is tainted cry out to the heavens. This terrible action by the state is neither Jewish nor democratic." *** Tariq Ali : This is the real outrage Amid the cartoon furore, Danish imams ignore the tragedies suffered by Muslims across the world The Guardian Monday February 13, 2006 The latest round of culture wars does neither side any good. The western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims as the other - different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in debate but to provoke, and they succeeded. The same newspaper declined to print caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the "religious pain" that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted. I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis. Article continues But the cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist is a crude racist stereotype. The implication is that every Muslim is a potential terrorist. This is the sort of nonsense that leads to Islamophobia. Muslims have every right to protest, but the overreaction was unnecessary. In reality, the number of original demonstrators was tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few hundred in Britain (before Saturday's bigger reconciliation march), and government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy. Beirut was a bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the protests had entered the subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They certainly haven't anywhere in the Muslim world, though the European media has been busy fertilising the widespread ignorance that exists in this continent. How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media. What I find interesting is that these demonstrations and embassy-burnings are a response to a tasteless cartoon. Did the Danish imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur'an. It was a vile act and there was an official inquiry. The marine in question explained that he had been urinating on a prisoner and a few drops had fallen accidentally on the Qur'an - as if pissing on a prisoner (an old imperial habit) was somehow more acceptable. Yesterday, footage of British soldiers brutalising and abusing civilians in Iraq - beating teenagers with batons until they pass out, posing for the camera as they kick corpses - was made public. No one can seriously imagine these are the isolated incidents the Ministry of Defence claims; they are of course the norm under colonial occupations. Who will protest now - the media pundits defending the Enlightenment or Muslim clerics frothing over the cartoons? It's strange that the Danish imams and their friends abroad ignore the real tragedy and instead ensure that the cartoons are now being reprinted everywhere. How will it end? Like all these things do, with no gains on either side and a last tango in Copenhagen around a mountain of unused butter. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine the occupations continue. · Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. 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