Punitive residency revocation

Since the unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has been manipulating Jerusalem’s demographic balance by Increasing the Jewish population and reducing the Palestinian population of the city. One of the most effective measures used to reach this goal is revocation of the permanent residency status of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. Most East Jerusalem Palestinians are not citizens of Israel, rather they hold a permanent residency status, which may be cancelled at the discretion of Israel’s Minister of Interior. Since 1967, more than 14,500 residencies were revoked from Palestinian Jerusalemites. More than half of these revocations occurred in the last ten years (2006-2015). During the past fifty years, the grounds on in which Palestinians could face revocation of residency were gradually expanded by Israel’s Minister of Interior and Israel’s Supreme Court. The initial general policy provided that a resident would lose his residency status by “settling outside Israel” for a period of seven years or by receiving the status of resident or citizen in another country. In 1995 Israel suddenly started revoking residencies of Jerusalemites who were residing abroad for less than seven years and had not obtained a residency status or citizenship of a foreign country. According to the new policy, a Palestinian would be considered to have settled outside Israel if his “centre of life” was outside Israel. To make matters worse, Israel now considered the West Bank and Gaza to be abroad. This new criterion led to a new wave of revocations: since 1995 more than 11,000 residencies have been revoked. In 2006, a new dangerous precedent was set. The Israëli Ministry of Interior decided to revoke the residency status of four East Jerusalem Palestinians, because they violated the minimal obligation of loyalty to the state of Israel, thus imposing a duty of allegiance to Israel on East Jerusalem Palestinians. A petition questioning the legality of residency revocations based on this new criterion is still pending before the Supreme Court. In January 2016, without awaiting the Courts decision on the legality of this new policy, Israel’s Interior Minister punitively revoked the residency status of four East Jerusalem Palestinians who allegedly committed criminal acts.nrpages: 32status: publishe