Israeli Ruling Puts a Freeze on Family Ties

Bassam Mahedawi, a 31-year-old West Bank resident, dreams about the day he can finally live with his wife and two children.

They are separated by just two miles, but it might as well be a continent. Mahedawi lives in a village near the town of Tulkarm. His wife, Maha Salamah, is an Israeli citizen who lives with their two sons--ages 2 and 1--across the Green Line that separates the West Bank from Israel.

The gulf between them widened this month when the Israeli Cabinet decided to freeze family reunification requests, preventing Israeli Arabs from reuniting with family members who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The decision in effect separates thousands of families, keeping children from their parents and spouses from each other.

Granting residency permits to Palestinians would make it easy for suicide bombers to infiltrate Israel and launch more attacks against civilians, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, an ultra-Orthodox political leader, said before he was unseated Monday in a political struggle.

Yishai, who pushed for the ban, said he wanted to keep Palestinians and other non-Jews out of Israel because their increasing numbers threaten the Jewish character of the state.

Israeli human rights lawyers called the government’s decision racist, saying it amounted to collective punishment against Arabs.

“It is unbelievable that Israel is taking this position,” said Sharon Abraham Weiss, an attorney with the Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel, which is challenging the Cabinet decision. “Imagine if I have two children with a French guy, and the immigration authorities in France tell me that ‘you and your kids cannot come here to live with their father because we’ve decided not to let any Jews in.’”

Arabs, who make up nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, say the freezing of family reunification requests is the latest attack on their citizenship--and their dignity. Recently, top Israeli leaders have said that residents of Israeli Arab towns near the Green Line would no longer be Israeli citizens if Israel decided to cede their communities to a future Palestinian state.

“There is a genuine feeling among the Arabs that they have been pushed to the margins of Israeli society,” said Shuweiki Hatib, chairman of the National Arab Monitoring Committee, the main Israeli Arab group.

Israeli Arabs say their connection to the West Bank dates back generations. After Israel declared its independence in 1948--and the cease-fire line later known as the Green Line was drawn--Arabs within Israel’s borders became citizens while their relatives and friends in the West Bank and Gaza remained stateless.

Mahedawi and Salamah met in early 1998 when she and her uncle came to shop at Mahedawi’s horse farm. They married a few weeks later--on April 4, 1998.

On her wedding day, Salamah became a bride and a virtual widow, she said. Salamah and her new husband spent only a few weeks together in their first two years of marriage, she said.

Shortly after their wedding, Salamah applied to the Israeli immigration authorities for Mahedawi to join her in Israel. The Interior Ministry gave her no explanation why the application wasn’t being approved, she said.

It didn’t help matters when Mahedawi rode his horse to visit her a few months after their wedding and police arrested him for being in Israel without a permit.

After his arrest, the couple decided that Salamah would travel to the West Bank to see Mahedawi.

With her two children in tow, Salamah now traverses unpaved dirt roads to get around military checkpoints that prevent Israeli citizens from entering the West Bank.

The trip has become so tedious that, Salamah said, she visits her husband’s home only every six weeks.

Whatever hopes Salamah and Mahedawi nurtured of living together evaporated this month when the Cabinet unanimously voted to freeze all family reunification requests involving Arabs.

Salamah and Mahedawi were devastated.

“I want to be with him,” Salamah said. “I got married so I wouldn’t be alone.”

Mahedawi said he can no longer afford to talk regularly on the phone with his wife because he is unemployed. His horse farm lost all its Israeli customers and went out of business after the Palestinian uprising broke out 20 months ago.

He agonizes about not being able to see his sons take their first step or utter their first words.

“Whenever they see me,” he said, “they think I’m a stranger.”

Why doesn’t Salamah move to the West Bank?

“It’s really difficult for someone who lives in heaven to come and live in hell,” Mahedawi said.

The Cabinet decision affects people on both sides of the border.

Gail, a 45-year-old New Yorker who holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, said she was dumbstruck last month when immigration officials told her that they wouldn’t renew her Jordanian husband’s permit because he was an Arab.

“It’s hard to believe the government is telling me what nationality of spouses [it] would approve,” said Gail, who asked that her last name not be used. “Every application should be dealt with on its merit. You cannot exclude everyone of an ethnic group.”

The Interior Ministry said it decided to stop considering residency requests for Arabs after a bomber blew himself up in Haifa on March 31, killing 15 people. The bomber, according to authorities, had been granted a permit to live inside Israel because his mother was married to an Israeli.

Yishai, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, aims to reduce the number of Arabs and other non-Jews granted Israeli citizenship. He said that during the last decade, the government approved residency permits for 100,000 Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Perhaps this is deliberate policy on the part of [Yasser Arafat’s] Palestinian Authority, to change in a sophisticated way the demographic structure of Israel,” Yishai said. It is “the realization of ‘the right of return’ through the back door.”

Yishai was referring to the Palestinian demand that Arabs displaced since the Jewish state’s independence be allowed to return to their homes inside Israel. Many Israelis say that allowing a “right of return” for Arabs would amount to the suicidal destruction of Israel.

Weiss, the human rights lawyer, said Yishai’s fears are unfounded. She has asked Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the Cabinet decision, saying it violated laws against discrimination.

Times special correspondent Maher Abukhater contributed to this report.