Not being able to obtain family unification for their Palestinian spouses leaves thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jerusalem residents with two options: having their spouse live with them illegally or moving to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where they would be living under Israeli military occupation, in a situation of conflict and facing daily incursions by the Israeli army, bombardments, house demolition, curfews and hundreds of checkpoints, which make it extremely difficult to move, work or carry out ordinary daily activities. In addition, it is illegal for Israelis and Jerusalemites to enter the Occupied Territories and those married to residents of the Occupied Territories may only do so in special circumstances and subject to permits and stringent restrictions.
Salwa Abu Jaber, a 29-year-old kindergarten assistant from Umm al-Ghanam in Northern Israel, has been married since 1993 to Mahmoud al-Hadour, from the Jenin area in the West Bank. She told Amnesty International: "We have been married for 11 years, since 12 March 1993 and we have three daughters aged 10, seven and 18 months and a three-year-old boy. My children were all born in Israel and we have always lived here, but until now my husband has not been allowed family unification. My husband has never had any security problems, he was never arrested by the army in the past or anything; he is just a normal person. In 1995, for a year my husband was able to get permits to be in Israel during the day as a worker, which proves that he has no security problem. What is the logic to allow him to be in Israel during the day but not to sleep with his family? So, he has been living here illegally. After we got married I immediately applied for family unification in the Ministry of Interior office in Afula. We got no response until 1997, after the intervention of a human rights organization, but the application was refused; they gave us no explanation for the refusal. At the Interior Ministry they told me to either get divorced or to go live in the West Bank. But I love my husband and he loves me and we don't want to divorce and I don't want to take my children to live in the West Bank in the middle of a war and insecurity; it is just not possible. And anyway, when the police used to expel my husband to the West Bank and I tried to visit him the army did not even let me through the checkpoint because as an Israeli citizen it is illegal for me to go to the West Bank. So my husband is like a prisoner here; he cannot go anywhere for fear of being arrested and expelled again, and now if he were expelled he would never manage to get back into Israel again. And so he cannot work, cannot have anything like a normal life; his father died three years ago and he was not even able to go to his funeral. What kind of life is this? We cannot live like this forever. Recently I have decided to seek asylum for our family in any country; I have asked the Canadian and the Dutch embassies but I have not yet received any response. What else can we do? We just want to have a normal life, like any other family.
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Terry Bullata, a 38-year-old school principal from Jerusalem, is married to Salah Ayyad, a businessman from Abu Dis, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem part of which was annexed to Israel after the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and part of which remains in the occupied West Bank. The couple have been married since November 1990 but in spite of repeated attempts Salah has never even been admitted to the family unification procedure, according to which he would have been granted a temporary permit to reside with his wife and children in Jerusalem, pending final determination of the case.
Their two daughters, 12-year-old Zina and seven-year-old Yasmin, were both born in Jerusalem but it took years and a court battle for Terry to be able to register them on her Jerusalem ID. When Zina was born in 1992, Israel still did not allow Palestinian Jerusalemite women to register their children on their ID; only Jerusalemites men could register their children as Jerusalem residents. The practice changed in 1994, but for many Palestinian Jerusalemite women it took years to register their children on their IDs.
By 1997, when her second daughter was born, Terry had still not been able to register her first daughter, born five years earlier, on her ID and by 1998 she herself faced the risk of losing her Jerusalem residency. The Israeli authorities attempted to confiscate her Jerusalem ID and strip her of her residency right, claiming that she had not been living in Jerusalem, even though she was born and has lived in Jerusalem all her life, except for a five-year period. In the early 1990s Terry and her family had lived in a different part of Abu Dis (which falls within the West Bank) for about four years, then spent one year in the United States and since 1995 the family has been living in the part of Abu Dis which falls within the Jerusalem municipality. Thus, the total period during which Terry resided outside the Jerusalem municipality was no more than five years, that is two years less than the seven-year period of absence after which Palestinian Jerusalemites can lose their residency according to Israeli regulations. Nonetheless, it was necessary for Terry to fight a prolonged and costly court battle to keep her right to residence and to obtain the same right for her daughters.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150632004
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