Just Married
Just Married by director Ayelet Bechar was really good. It documents the difficulties of two couples Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. As of 2002 there is a law prohibiting family reunification.
Suhad and Rabia are a young couple that met at university. To be together Suhad becomes an illegal resident in Jerusalem. The film depicts her change from vibrancy to depression as she stays in her home most of the time so she is not caught. In a depressing bit of circular beaurocracy, her husband Rabia (the one with legal status in Israel) requests a permit for her and is told he must file for Family Reunification but that no requests are being taken at this time and she cannot be given any other sort of document because she needs the one of family reuinification.
For the older couple on the film Kifach and Yazeed, the solution is to stay in Berlin until the law changes and they can go home. Kifach struggles to learn German and at the same time, she must be in Israel for part of the year so she does not lost her status as is threatened in one municipal office. She had been very active in the struggle for coexistence in Israel and has many photos with major Israeli political figures such as Shulamit Aloni and Ehud Barak. Her husband views Barak as slime and does not want to see the photo, there is elegant symmetry in the film as Kifach later confronts Barak at a conference in Berlin about this law keeping families apart.
There is also a beautiful symmetry as the film ends with both families giving birth to children.
It is a complex issue. The situations these people are in are terrible. They are being kept from having a family with the person they love in their homes. The Israeli government believes that this horrible law may be saving someone’s life; it feels it must ignore the fact that it is also adding much misery to many innocent civilians.
The law was ammended so that women above the age of 25 and men above the age of 35 may now apply for family reunification. The director was at the screening and gave the update that Suhad was about to have her birthday and would more than likely obtain family reuinification and that Kifach’s struggle continues as well.
It makes me feel lucky that all I have to deal with is a bunch of paperwork and a $1000 fee for a fiancee visa to the UK. Our revolution was a really long time ago. (Though, it does suck that the price doubled as of April 1st of this year.)
There is a great summary of the Israeli law involved from a recent Jerusalem Post article (Background: Terror plot may have blown family reunification By DAN IZENBERG, April 11, 2007) :
“Prohibitions on family reunification were first introduced by the Interior Ministry on April 1, 2002, following the suicide bombing at the Matza restaurant in Haifa’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood in which 15 Israelis were killed. The driver of the car bomb was a Hamas terrorist who had married an Israeli and carried a blue identity card.
Initially, the freeze on family reunification was total. No Palestinian who married an Israeli could begin the five-year process for obtaining residential rights or citizenship, and those who were in the middle of the process could not advance.
On July 31, 2003, the Knesset turned the administrative decision into a one-year law, which was periodically extended.
On July 27, 2005, the law was amended so that Palestinian women above the age of 25 and men above 35 could live with their Israeli spouses if they met security criteria. Younger Palestinians were still barred from living in Israel.
On March 21, 2007, the law was amended again and extended until July 2008. The current law provides a humanitarian committee to consider exceptional requests for family reunification from women under 25 and men under 35, but toughens the security criteria and extends the restrictions to spouses from countries classified as enemy.
The law in all its forms has been harshly criticized by human rights groups in Israel and abroad. In May, the High Court narrowly rejected a petition to overrule it in its second version. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On and the Israeli-Arab rights group Adalah have already declared they will petition against the newly amended law.
The human rights groups claim the law violates the fundamental right of every citizen to a family and is motivated by Jewish demographic concerns. The law prevents roughly 20,000 Palestinians from living in Israel with their Israeli spouses and also prevents them from raising families in Israel.
The government insists the temporary law is based on security considerations. Granting Palestinians Israeli identity cards and the right to unrestricted freedom of movement throughout Israel is dangerous, officials say.”
UPDATE: 29 Oct. 07: Israel to approve some 3,400 requests for family unification in one-time action
