“Family reunion” blowing up in our faces

By Dr. Reuven Berko, ISRAEL HAYOM

Our sages said long ago that “he who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate.” The terrorist attack in Beersheba on Sunday evening — committed by 21-year-old Muhand Khalil al-Okab from the Bedouin community of Alhoura in the Negev, who holds Israeli citizenship because his mother, a Palestinian from Gaza, married an Israeli Bedouin — brought us back into the absurd controversy over opposition to the Citizenship Law.

The debate began in 2002 after 16 Israelis were murdered in a suicide bombing at the Matza restaurant in Haifa, executed by a Palestinian who had been granted “family reunification” and an Israeli ID card because his mother had married an Israeli Arab. The Citizenship Law, passed in 2003, decided that Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs would not be granted legal or residency status in Israel.

The late High Court Justice Mishael Cheshin was the voice of reason who upheld the law. Former High Court Justice Aharon Barak, on the other hand, believed that the end — the security and welfare of the Israeli public — did not justify all the means and that family reunification in Israel should be permitted in cases where one member of a couple was an Israeli Arab.

Barak’s reasoning demonstrated universalism, greatness of spirit, and deep humanitarian identification with couples for whom, as he put it, “Israel is home, community, [as well as] historical and cultural and social references.”

“The Citizenship Law attacks the right of Palestinians to a family life and equality unnecessarily,” Barak said.

Just what is “necessary”? Barak and his gods know.

In 2005, the High Court of Justice authorized family reunification for men from the age of 35 on and for women from the age of 25, as if maturity would suddenly turn them and their offspring into Zionists. In 2006, over the objection of the “humanists” from the rights group Adallah and the devotees of the Left, Cheshin rejected the claim that “many thousands of Palestinian citizens’ lives were [being] adversely affected” (as one High Court justice wrote) and decided that the benefit to Israeli security took precedence over the harm to the rights of the Arab minority.

Cheshin ruled that Israel had the right to enact laws limiting the arrival of foreign citizens, including their spouses, and had the authority to keep “enemy agents” from crossing into its territory. He sent a man from Umm al-Fahm who married a Palestinian woman to live with her in Jenin. Love indeed has no borders. In fact, let any couple, including residents of the territories, throw off “the chains of the loathsome Zionist occupation and Israeli apartheid” and live freely in liberated Palestine, with the PLO flag flying over their home.

The latest terrorist attack in Beersheba backs up a 2006 report by the Shin Bet security agency stating that over 40% of the Israeli Arabs involved in terrorism are Palestinians who were given Israeli ID cards under the family reunification statutes. The Palestinians see exploiting this process as part of concept of a “Palestinian birth explosion” and “right of return,” which are designed to drown Israel in a demographic flood and bloody terrorist attacks. Many women from Gaza are secretly married to Bedouin men and living illegally in the Negev, giving birth “twice a year” under cover of the legally documented wife. One Arab MK is a proud Palestinian bigamist who has a second wife as part of the “exploding womb” idea. Even Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s sisters married residents of the Negev, and his daughter was treated in an Israeli hospital.

Prof. Arnon Sofer from the University of Haifa reports that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have tricked and deceived their way into Israel, and there is no mechanism in place to enforce the law. This individual import of enemies who then feed off state funds while plotting against it and spilling the blood of its citizens, is the height of Israeli stupidity and absurdity — dressed up as “universalism and humanism,” of course.