By Palestine Chronicle Staff
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Association or Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) issued a statement in response to a newly approved law, which allows Israeli courts “to prevent citizens living outside the country from returning home if the state has a ‘concern’ that their return would allegedly endanger Israeli national security.”
The statement noted that the right to citizenship has become a target for the Israeli Knesset, which essentially targets Arab citizens of Israel. “The right to citizenship has itself become a target in the state’s vindictive efforts to threaten the status of Arab citizens. The Knesset has chosen to inflict severe harm to this most basic of rights.”
The Israeli claim to the new law is that these citizens constitute a danger to the security of the state, noting that “The law allows revocation of citizenship based on unproven and speculative ‘concern’ that state security might be threatened, without having to present any actual evidence to the individual in question.”
This is incitement to #racism. You're targeting people based on #ethnicity / Adalah talks with @AJEnglish https://t.co/3mKI5E3K2B
— Adalah (@AdalahEnglish) February 27, 2017
The statement, issued earlier on March 08, noted, “The Supreme Court has already ruled – in the case of Yigal Amir, convicted of assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – that citizenship cannot be revoked on the basis that it is a fundamental right. This new law, in addition, also violates a citizen’s fundamental right to enter the country.”
Adalah and ACRI, in an earlier letter stressed, “this is accepted in international law… The right to citizenship is considered the most important of all rights, as it encompasses a bundle of other constitutional rights – the right to enter the country, exemption from deportation, the right to work, the right to health and welfare services, the right to vote and so on.”
Israeli violations against its Arab citizens have recently mounted with the Israeli authorities approving the demolition of dozens of Arab houses inside the Green Line.
(PalestineChronicle.com)
