Israel extends discriminatory family law for another year

  The Independent:
Israel's Knesset has extended a law that bans Palestinians married to Israelis from living with their spouses in Israel for another year.

The law was first passed in 2003 and extended in 2008, and forbids Palestinians married to Israelis from living in Israel, or becoming Israeli citizens.Many critics say that the law essentially makes marriage between Israelis and Palestinians impossible, as the couple would have to live in different countries that are very difficult to pass between.
The law was first introduced as a temporary security measure that would only last for a year, aimed at preventing potential terrorists coming into Israel through marriage.

Israel extends Citizens Law that puts severe restrictions on Palestinians' right to live together with spouses from abroad

Tjhe Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu decided unanimously on Sunday to extend the Citizenship Law restricting the "family reunification" of Israeli citizens with foreign partners for an additional year. The law denies entry or living permits to partners who are considered a security threat, among them Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and citizens of 'enemy countries'.
The law affects mainly Israeli Arab citizens and their families from the West Bank, East-Jerusalem and Gaza. Is is estimated that at least a 100.000 persons are affected. 
The proposal to extend the law was submitted by Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar, and was formulated based on an opinion of the internal security service Shin Bet regarding the risks concerning partners from the Gaza Strip.
Israel generally grants citizenship to spouses of Israelis in a gradual process. A 2002 temporary order excluded Palestinian spouses from these processes and barred them from becoming Israeli citizens.The law was extended several times since then and in 2008 the geographic jurisdiction of the law was expanded, making it applicable to spouses from Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq as well as other areas on which the government was free to decide.
The organization Adalah for minority rights in Israel; and the Association for Civil Rights in  Israel petitioned the High Court, but this ruled in a 6-5 decision on 12 January 2012, that it is 'the constitutional right of couples to live together, but that that this does not necessarily require that they make their home in Israel'. The majority ruled that even if the law did harm constitutional rights such as the right to equality, the infringement was proportional and not in conflict with Israel's Basic Laws, the set of legislation with constitutional standing. 
The new extension of the law was sharply criticized by Zahava Gal-On, the leader of the leftist Meretz Party. She said that the decision placed "draconian restrictions on Israeli Arab citizens' right to marry," and called the designation of all Palestinians as a security threat "racist" and discriminatory.

Palestinian official Saeb Erekat called the law "racist" and an attempt to "distort the Palestinian social fabric and force the displacement of Palestinian families." He called on the international community to “seriously examine the pattern of Israeli policies contributing to a situation of apartheid and to look into the wider effects and implications of the Israeli government’s precondition of being recognized as a Jewish State.

Israel compels Arab visitors to have their email checked at Ben Gurion airport

Ben Gurion airport

 AP reports about a new (?) development concerning people of Arab descent who want to visit Israel:


 When Sandra Tamari arrived at Israel's international airport, she received an unusual request: A security agent pushed a computer screen in front of her, connected to Gmail and told her to "log in."

The agent, suspecting Tamari was involved in pro-Palestinian activism, wanted to inspect her private email account for incriminating evidence. The 42-year-old American of Palestinian descent refused and was swiftly expelled from the country.

Tamari's experience is not unique. In a cyber-age twist on Israel's vaunted history of airport security, the country has begun to force incoming travelers deemed suspicious to open personal email accounts for inspection, visitors say. (continue here)

AP wrote this apparently after the site Mondoweiss featured a similar horror story one day earlier.  

Would they do it only to Arab visitors? And what about bloggers?

Forced eviction of Copts from village near Alexandria raises protests

 The Human Rights Committee of the Egyptian People's Assembly rejected, in an emergency meeting Sunday night, the forced eviction of eight Coptic families from their homes in Alexandria, stressing the importance of combating sectarian tension.
The Committee was called together at the request of representative Emad Gad of the Social Democratic party, who is a Copt himself. He said that the Human Rights Committee would issue recommendations that should be adopted by the PA and raised to the government to apply. He said that the expected recommendations are to stop the forced displacement and to hold the perpetrators accountable.
 The eviction of the eight families is one of the youngest incidents concerning tension between Copts and Muslims in Egypt. The place where it happened was the village of Sharbat in the Ameriya district of the Alexandria governorate. And the story was that hundreds of the village’s Muslim residents had attacked on 27 January the home and shops of a Coptic tailor, Murad Girgis, following rumors that he had an affair with a Muslim woman. Girgis, it seems,  was being blackmailed by a Muslim barber who accused him of having taken pictures of Muslim girls in the fitting room of his workshop. Fearing for his life, Girgis handed himself over to police, but to no avail. His properties, but also the homes and shops of his relatives were r set on fire.
Following these incidents a so called reconciliation meeting was held by the village elders, which was and attended  by the governor of Alexandria, Osama al-Fouli, the director of security and several MPs, affiliated with the Salafi Al-Nour Party. And at this meeting the eight Coptic families were forced to leave. They were told that their safety could not be guaranteed if they decided to stay. A committee was set up to sell their property.
The events were documented and forcefully rejected by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), which noted that ''the law does not permit customary reconciliation in cases of arson, and in sponsoring the customary agreement, governorate officials flagrantly violated the law, which necessitates a criminal investigation.
The EIPR utterly rejected this ''perpetuation of Mubarak-era policies that force victims of sectarian attacks—particularly those who have no stake in the original dispute—to accept the outcomes of illegal reconciliation processes and thus compel them to abandon their rights and accept the assaults on them—indeed, compel them to evacuate their homes and be expelled from their village—instead of the provision of protection and legal aid by state authorities.