From Israeli NGO Adalah: some Key Discriminatory Laws

The Law of Return (1950) grants every Jewish person in the world the right to obtain citizenship in Israel; by contrast, Israel denies the Right of Return to the Palestinian refugees.

The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) defines all Palestinians who were expelled or fled in 1947 as absentees and their property as absentee property. The law was used to confiscate millions of dunams of land later used for Jewish settlement.

The Citizenship and Entry Law (2003) bans family unification in Israel between Israeli Arabs and their spouses from the Palestinian Territories, Iran, Syria, Lebanon or Iraq.

The Benefits for Discharged Soldiers Law (2008) allows all institutions of higher education to consider military service –from which Israeli Arabs are exempt for historical and political reasons –when determining applicants’ eligibility for financial assistance.

The Economic Efficiency Law (2009) gives the government sweeping discretion to designate “National Priority Areas” and to allocate vast resources for their development, which it does so in a way that systematically excludes Arab communities.

The Admissions Committees Law (2011) allows hundreds of small towns built on state land to select applicants based on their “social suitability”. The law is used in practice to filter out Israeli Arabs and members of other marginalized groups.

The Nakba Law (2011) strips state funding from any public entity, including educational institutions, that commemorates the Nakba.

The Expulsion Law (2016) allows for the expulsion of Arab Knesset Members by their peers on ideological grounds, based on majority claims that they incite racism or support terror. (This is not used on MKs who support Israeli settler terrorist attacks)

The Kaminitz Law (2017) increases enforcement and penalization of planning and building offenses. The law has a disparate impact on PCI, many of whom are forced to build illegally due to decades of discrimination by the planning and building system.

The Jewish Nation-State Law (2018) guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish, denies the right to self-determination of PCI, and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring systemic inequality, discrimination and racism against Israeli Arabs.