Israel’s Interior Minister Arye Dery announced that nearly 450 Palestinians who were expected to receive residency status as part of the so-called “family unification” arrangement failed to meet the required criteria for naturalization. These Palestinians will receive neither permanent residency nor temporary residency status.

Hadash lawmaker MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Photo: Al Ittihad)

This development follows a government commitment, made in response to an April 2016 Supreme Court petition, to grant some 2,000 temporary visas to Palestinians living in Israel, while not granting them official status or social benefits.

Israel allows Palestinian spouses of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to apply for citizenship through a process called family unification. A similar process allows for the naturalization of spouses of Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel but who are rather permanent residents (like tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem), though this latter process takes longer. Most family unification applications in Israel are submitted on behalf of a Palestinian spouse living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

Hadash lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman (Joint List), attempting to follow up on the court ruling, lodged a formal request with Dery to follow up on the matter. Dery informed her last week that hundreds of the Palestinians who were on the list given to the court and slated for residency permits would not be granted temporary status after all.

MK Touma-Sliman, enraged by this response, said to Haaretz: “The Interior Ministry’s promise from last year is the bare minimum of what Israel can do, and even that it can’t make good on.” “This testifies to the ongoing injustice that the ban on family unification causes. Behind every denied request there is the story of a family whose only crime is being born Palestinian,” she continued.

MK Touma-Sliman further criticized a law preventing family unification, which is expected to be extended, as it is annually, once again, saying, “This law is testimony to racism at its finest. It is hard to find any other reason for it. It joins a long line of legislation and racist guidelines, which persecute the Palestinian people. Every once and a while they put the law to a vote in a moral test for the legislature, and every time the Knesset fails to make the grade both morally and according to any criteria of normative values.”