On March 31, 2002, days after the suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, there was another suicide bombing, this one at the Matza restaurant in Haifa. Sixteen Israelis, including three fathers with their children, were killed. The bomber, Shadi Tubasi, was an Israeli citizen who lived in Jenin. His mother, Naja, originally from the village Muqabla in the Gilboa Regional Council, had married a man from Jenin 30 years earlier, and even though she never returned to her home village, she retained Israeli citizenship.
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Thanks to the "family reunification" policy, through Naja, her husband and children – including her suicide bomber son – all obtained Israeli citizenship. Shadi exploited his, and the freedom of movement it gave him, to travel to Haifa where he carried out his horrific attack. About a third of the households in his village Muqabla were comprised of mixed Palestinian and Arab Israeli couples.
Back then, before Israel's citizenship and entry laws were amended by a temporary order that revoked citizenship or residency from Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who had married Arab Israelis, dozens of Palestinian terrorists used their Israeli citizenship to perpetrate terrorist attacks in Israel.
In November 2012 another naturalized citizen, Mohammad Abdel Jafari Nasser, took advantage of his Israeli ID card – which he received under the family reunification law – to carry out a terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv bus, which left 26 Israelis wounded. In October 2015 it was Mohand al-Uqabi, 21, the son of an Israeli father and a mother from Gaza, who murdered IDF solider Omri Levy at the Beersheba Central Bus Station. In December 2017, Khaled Abu Jaudah murdered IDF Sgt. Ron-Yitzhak Kokia at a bus stop in Arad. Abu Jaudah was also the child of a Palestinian from the West Bank who had married an Arab Israeli.
Yet another Palestinian who became Israel in 1993, after he married an Arab Israeli woman from Haifa, is Omar Barghouti, founder of the global BDS movement. Today, he lives in Acre. Barghouti might not be a terrorist, but he believes that the Jews are not a people, supports Palestinian right of return, and has reservations about dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians. A few years ago, the Interior Ministry cancelled Barghouti's travel documents.
According to figures from the security establishment for 2001-2016, children of family reunification represent about 5% of the country's Arab sector, but comprise 15% of Arab Israeli terrorists. When it comes to residents of Jerusalem, the number of children of family reunification involved in terrorism is 12 times their proportion of the population.
The same trend can be seen in Arab residents of the Negev, where children of family reunification make up 12% of the population. From 2000-2017, 44 Negev residents were involved in various types of terrorist activity (attacks, planning attacks, recruiting attackers or helpers, transferring money to fund terrorism, purchasing weapons, etc.).
Haifa District Court Judge Abraham Eliyakim, who a few years ago approved the revocation of the citizenship of Alaa Ziad, a terrorist from Umm al-Fahm who carried out a combined car ramming and stabbing attack near Gan Shmuel in October 2015, wrote in his ruling that "the second generation of family reunification such as Ziad (the son of a Palestinian father) are under inherent pressure between two loyalties or two identities."
After reviewing a classified opinion from the Shin Bet security agency, Eliyakim wrote that the second generation of family reunification "still preserved their Palestinian identity and Israel is seen as an enemy state in a conflict with their people. The family circle, given the family relationships with Judea and Samaria and Gaza, has an inherent influence on the upbringing and identification with the Palestinian mentality and narrative. Moreover, they come into contact with an environment that does not rule out terrorist or reject violence toward the Israeli public."
Eliyakim also observed that "even terrorist organizations have marked this population as potential recruits for terrorist activity, based on shared valued, their ability to move freely, and their knowledge of Israel."
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This is the background for the order that has been renewed annually since 2003, which revoke citizenship, residency, and sometimes even presence in Israel from Palestinians who married Arab Israelis. On July 6 of this year, the order currently in place will expire, but at the moment the new government is not securing a majority to pass it again. The four Ra'am MKs announced that they would not support a renewal of the order. MK Ibtisam Mara'ana of Labor and the Meretz members, have also announced they will not support it. The Likud and the other parties in its bloc, who every other year supported the order, are threatening to vote against it as a political move.
Opponents of the measure are suggesting alternatives. The Left is talking about a compromise in the form of changes to the interim orders that would soften it to allow Palestinian partners to drive inside Israel, enjoy public health benefits, and even give citizenship to 2,000 families who asked for it before the temporary order was enacted in 2003.
On the Right, the Likud is suggesting that the interim measure be replaced by a permanent law, Basic Law: Immigration, an idea that has the support of the Religious Zionist Party, the Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, and MK Amichai Chikli of Yamina. This proposal would, for the first time, establish rules about entry to Israel and the receipt of temporary and permanent residency, and Israeli citizenship, as well as grounds on which these could be denied or revoked.
'They aren't in any hurry'
Researcher Adi Schwartz observes that there is not necessarily a plan to weaken Israel by having Palestinians adopt citizenship.
"It's not that the naturalized citizens sit down and say, 'We're part of a plan to destroy the state of Israel.' An individual from Ramallah, Hebron, or Jaffa, or Bedouin from the Negev, don't necessarily intend as individuals to destroy us as a Jewish state," Schwartz explains, adding that the true story is "an Arab environment and collective that surrounds us, which does not recognize our borders or the entity known as Israel."
"As far as this collective is concerned, the whole project of Israel, in which Jews are the majority, isn't legitimate and should be eradicated. According to this view, the issue of family reunification is just another tool. Since the entire area is theirs anyway and there is no difference between Hebron, Beersheba, Ashdod, or Ashkelon, it really is a creeping implementation of the right of return in a different way, at their own pace. They aren't in any hurry," Schwartz says.
