Why Palestinians Want Israeli Citizenship

by Khaled Abu Toameh
October 23, 2012 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3407/palestinians-israeli-citizenship

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There is no denying that by applying for Israeli citizenship, in defiance of PLO and Hamas warnings, they are actually making clear that they would rather live under Israel than any Arab rule.

The Palestinian Authority says it is worried because of the rise in the number of Palestinians from Jerusalem who are seeking Israeli citizenship.
Hatem Abdel Kader, who is in charge of the "Jerusalem Portfolio" in the ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank, revealed that more than 10,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem have been granted Israeli citizenship.
Abdel Kader attributed the growing phenomenon to the failure of the Palestinian Authority and the Arab and Islamic countries to help the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.
In other words, he is admitting that Israel is doing more for these Palestinians than the Palestinian leadership and the entire Arab and Islamic countries.
According to figures released by the Israeli Ministry of Interior, 3,374 Palestinians obtained Israeli citizenship in the past decade.
According to ministry officials, in the past two years, the number of applicants for Israeli citizenship has intensified.
Palestinians living in Jerusalem enjoy the status of permanent residents of Israel. This means that they hold Israeli ID cards but do not have Israeli passports.
As permanent residents, they are entitled to all the rights of an Israeli citizen, with the exception of voting in general elections.
Israeli law, however, allows any resident to apply for citizenship.
Yet, in the first two decades since Israel annexed east Jerusalem after 1967, few Palestinians applied for citizenship.
At that time, it was considered an act of treason to apply for Israeli citizenship; the PLO openly threatened Palestinians who obtained it.
But the trend changed after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and, a year later, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Suddenly, the number of applicants increased dramatically and Palestinians were no longer afraid or ashamed to stand outside the offices of the Interior Ministry in Jerusalem to apply for Israeli citizenship.
The main reason the Palestinians rushed to apply for citizenship was their fear that Israel would also cede control over east Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority.
Their biggest fear was they would lose all the privileges they enjoy as residents living under Israeli sovereignty, including free health care and education, and freedom of movement and work.
In addition, the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem realized that despite all the difficulties they face in Israel, their living conditions were still far much better than those living under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
Lack of democracy and massive financial corruption under the Palestinian Authority also drove many Palestinian Jerusalemites to apply for Israeli citizenship as a way of ensuring that they would always remain under Israeli sovereignty.
As one Palestinian explained, "I prefer the hell of the Jews to the paradise of Hamas or Yasser Arafat."
Another reason Palestinians are rushing to apply for Israeli citizenship is their fear that the Israeli authorities may revoke their Israeli-issued ID cards.
According to the ministry regulations, Palestinian residents of the city who move to live outside the country automatically lose their status as permanent residents.
In the past decade, many Palestinian residents who moved to the West bank or left Israel lost their Israeli-issued ID cards.
Many of those who have applied for Israeli citizenship are are Christians from Jerusalem who are also afraid of ending up under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
Ironically, obtaining Israeli citizenship has become a way for Palestinians to ensure their social, economic, health and education rights in the country.
There is no denying that applying for Israeli citizenship, in defiance of PLO and Hamas warnings, is also a political statement on the part of the applicants. They are actually making clear that they would prefer to live under Israel than any Arab rule.

Related Topics: Israel | Khaled Abu Toameh

Nobel Peace Prize Rewards The End of Democracy

by Douglas Murray
October 23, 2012 at 4:30 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3408/european-union-nobel-prize

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The distinctly non-democratic Nobel committee has chosen to reward a project which began by merely subverting democracy but which now appears to be going about the job of ending it.

Many of us can, I am sure, remember where we were when we realized that the resplendence of the Nobel Prize had diminished. For some this realization can be traced to the news that Yasser Arafat had become joint recipient of the Peace Prize (an award of which he was never stripped). For others it will have been the announcement earlier this month that the award had been given to the EU.
The thinking behind this latest award appears to be the one you can hear among the political elite of Europe and which I was recently fortunate enough to hear pronounced by a British MP. It usually goes something like this: that without the EU the people of Europe would have spent the last seventy years happily massacring each other as they did throughout their past.
To believe this you have to believe a number of things. First you must believe that Europe's past was a particular aberration and peculiar to our continent. Second, your historical knowledge must be limited to some broad ideas about the twentieth century. Third, you must ignore the 1990s. Fourth, and finally, you must believe that this unique and innate viciousness of Europeans can best be solved by abandoning democracy.
You must believe, for instance, that you go to the people for their opinions as infrequently as possible, and only then to ask for more powers. You might do this by offering placebo referenda, the catch being that if people vote against awarding more powers to the elite (as they did in Ireland, France and Holland), then the people will be made to vote again until they come up with the right answer.
Such abandonments of democratic niceties has gone on at the EU supranational level now for years. The miracle of awarding the Nobel Prize to the EU in this year of all years, though, is that this is the year in which the EU has managed additionally to erase the democratic process at the national level.
For more than a decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has become ever-more narrowly a political prize. How otherwise to explain the obsession with rewarding US Democrat party leaders? Over the last decade alone three of them have been given the prize: Jimmy Carter in 2002, Al Gore for his slide-show presentation in 2007 and Barack Obama, for doing less, in 2009.
It is clear from these, among other awards, that the Nobel judging committee sees its role as pushing the United States in a peculiar and specific European direction. This latest award must therefore count as one of the worst-timed awards in the Nobel's history. The distinctly non-democratic Nobel committee has chosen to reward a project which began by subverting nation-state democracy but which now appears to be quietly going about the job of ending it.
Britain, for instance, signed up for membership in a "common market." What we have got, instead, is membership in an unaccountable super-state whose decisions and opinions now override our national laws, stripping us of sovereignty and such basic rights as deciding who should be allowed to come and live in our country. The final insult is that, presumably, there is deliberately no mechanism built into the system that allows our increasingly unnecessary national political leaders to extricate us from this situation. It is a "roach motel": in true totalitarian fashion you can enter but you cannot leave. The Soviet dissident, author Vladimir Bukovsky, refers to the unelected, unaccountable, irremovable group as the "EUSSR."
At the time of the award, most media focused on the unhappy visual juxtapositions that accompanied it. For at the same moment that the Nobel committee were making their announcement, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being greeted in Greece by protestors dressed as Nazis. It was, indeed, a powerful blend of images, nicely suggesting that peace might not be all it's cracked up to be for the new prize winners.
But this was not the real story. As always, in an image-obsessed age it is far too easy to miss those things which are quietly going on all the time without any particularly dramatic illustrations.
It is now almost exactly a year since the EU parachuted in an unelected leader to run Italy. Italy's problems, like those of Greece, are by no means straightforward, but are certainly – though nobody much likes to say this – of its own making. Like Ireland, Britain and most of the rest of Europe, Italy and Greece, for years lived far beyond their means and now face the consequences. But in last year's appointment of Mario Monti to the head of the Italian government, the EU began to tread a path at the end of which is not simply a challenge to democracy but the end of it. Anybody who wants to see where the EU leads can see it now.
Unnoticed by anybody outside, mainstream Italian politicians have now given up on democracy. The leaders of centrist parties now concede that although they would like to remain in office, and although they intend to keep taking their salaries of thousands of Euros each month and do not intend to give up their chauffeur-driven cars, only Monti can run the place. In acknowledging this, Gianfranco Fini, and others, have shown that what they really want the trappings of office without its burdens. Government is no longer for democrats. Government is for unelected bureaucrats. As a result, even the process of democracy – elections for instance – become a mime-show, with the people putting themselves forward for election being those who themselves support unelected leaders.
Thus the EU, which began as an unelected and anti-democratic central authority (including an "EU Foreign minister" whom nobody in Europe ever heard of, let alone voted for) has become outwardly expressive in its habits: after decades of the EU being a non-democratic body, it now encourages non-democracy in others.
Why this has come about – why the elite have come to distrust the people of Europe so much that they now wholly side-step them – is a subject for another time. For now, a simple point needs to be made. Now that democracy has been suspended in Europe and in specific European countries such as Italy, does anybody know when it might be reinstated? Or who is proposing to begin the process?
The EU has not bothered considering that question. The Nobel committee do not know. If the latter had any decency they would make the collection of the award contingent on the recipient providing an answer to that question before it is too late.

Related Topics: Douglas Murray

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