Residency Rights: An Introduction

The issue of residency is one of the issues in which discrimination between Israelis and Palestinians is harshest. In practice, a person who is not Israeli does not have guaranteed rights in matters relating to residency and family unity. One of the basic principles of Zionism and of every Israeli government has been to ensure a large Jewish majority in Israel, including territories occupied; whence the many difficulties of non-Jewish citizens to impart residency rights to their relatives.

The problem is even worse regarding East Jerusalem residents who are not Israeli citizens because, following the annexation decision, as Permanent Residents of the State of Israel, they have even less rights than the Palestinian Israeli citizens. It is possible to ascertain that, concerning residency and family unity, the situation of Palestinian East Jerusalem residents is even more difficult than that of the rest of the occupied Palestinians. The reason for this is simple; while, in the eyes of Israeli governments, the future of the occupied territories remains an open question, Jerusalem is "unified for eternity as the capital of the Israeli state". Therefore: every additional Palestinian in East Jerusalem disturbs the "demographic balance" between Israelis and Palestinians.

This is the context of the cruel policy of limiting Palestinian East Jerusalem residents' rights of residency and family unity, and for the creation of an intolerable situation for the majority of the people tied to Jerusalem but, through various administrative means, severed from the city by the Israeli occupation.

During the June 1967 war Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its residents, which had been administered by the Jordanian government since 1948. At the outbreak of the war, approximately 80,000 Palestinians were living in what the Jordanian administration considered to be East Jerusalem. Thousands of residents fled or were forced out of the city by the Israeli military forces during the war and thousands more were, at the time, working in Jordan and in other Arab states. In the same month the Israeli government made a formal decision to annex East Jerusalem.

The former Jordanian-defined municipality of East Jerusalem comprised only 8.5 percent of the 71,000 dunams (approximately 17,500 acres) which were annexed. The rest of the area included land from 28 villages and from the towns of al-Bireh, Bethlehem, and Beit Jala. One of the government planners' central criteria was to include as much land, and as few Palestinians, as possible in "unified" Jerusalem. Plans exist to expand the administrative area of Jerusalem northwards past Ramallah, eastwards towards the Jordan valley and southwards towards Hebron. This would expand greater Jerusalem to 27-28 percent of the West Bank.