Families in Waiting: Plight of Separated Families Addressed at Triangle Conference

The plight of 22,000 Arab Israeli families, in which one spouse is a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, was addressed at a national SHATIL conference last week, Families in Waiting: Between the Reality of Israeli Law and International Human Rights Conventions. Two hundred people gathered at the Al-Qassimi College in Baqa Algharbiya to address the separation of families caused by a 2003 change in Israeli law which prohibits granting citizenship to Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens.

"We wanted to expose the issue and to show the human faces behind it," said Aber Grayem, a community organizer in SHATIL's Baqa Algharbiya satellite office. "Our SHATIL branch is in the Triangle and most of the families who suffer from this issue live in this area. It's one of the most severe social problems here. Most of these marriages involve a woman in Israel and a man in the territories; they are young families with many small children. Some of the children don't have Israeli identity cards, which affects their rights to educational, health and social services. The women live as if they are single mothers, raising their children without the presence of a father in the house. We want to expose this problem to both the Jewish and Arab populations and to work with the social services to address the severe economic and social hardships these families face. This conference was a beginning."

The conference included sessions on the law and its influence on family reunification, the effect on children of split families, and case studies of the social an economic effects of enforced separation on families in the Arab villages of Baqa Algharbiya and Jat.

Speaking at the conference, former Knesset Chair Avraham Burg suggested that the solution to the problem of divided families is pressure on elected officials.

"The issue must be led by Jewish Knesset member and not Arab ones," he said. "This shouldn't be perceived as a cry of the Arab minority...but as a humane responsibility of the majority."

Articles about the conference received an unusually high number (more than 200) of talkbacks on Ha'aretz and Ma'ariv's internet sites.

The conference was held in collaboration with local welfare authorities, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Bat Shalom, and other NGOs.