Israeli yesterday passed legislation which was designed to clarify the requirements of citizenship, to assure the purity of Israeli blood and to clarify the position of Palestinians in the Jewish state. Ok, I deliberately described the law in language closely patterned on that which is used to describe the notorious 1935 Nazi Nuremberg racial laws, but the reference and the impact of this act is extraordinarily important for the people affected by its abomination, and in fact for the entire world.
JERUSALEM, July 31 The Israeli Parliament voted today to block Palestinians who marry Israelis from becoming Israeli citizens or residents, erecting a new legal barrier as Israel finished the first section of a new physical barrier against West Bank Palestinians.Building walls around enclaves of inferior peoples, keeping them out of Jewish society and ultimately out of Jewish territory, and finding Lebensraum in what was formerly a Palestinian ghetto. Today's Israelis have had good teachers, but this horror was no more inevitable than that of Nazi Germany.. . . .
Opponents called [the marriage law] a racist measure that threatened to divide thousands of families or force them out of Israel. Roughly 1.2 million of Israel's 6.7 million citizens are Arabs, and they are far more likely than Israeli Jews to marry Palestinians.
"It cannot be that because of the actions of one, or 10, or 20, that a population of one million will be punished," said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of Parliament. He called the law "blacker than black."
Also today, Israel solicited construction bids to build 22 new homes in a settlement in the Gaza Strip. A new peace plan, the road map, calls on Israel to freeze settlement construction, but Israel says it must keep building to accommodate "natural growth."