Israel continues to enact racist laws... and the pretext is terrorism

Israel continues to enact racist laws, which constitute a serious violation of the rights of the Palestinians and a flagrant breach of the constitution and international law, as they are enacted based on racist principles and motives.

The culmination of the Knesset decisions yesterday morning resulted in a bill to deport the families of those who carry out national operations, as Israel considers them terrorists. Accordingly, the authority is granted to the Minister of the Interior to impose a decision to deport a close family member, who was aware of the intentions to carry out an operation and did not take the necessary steps to prevent it, to the Gaza Strip from within Palestine or from Jerusalem for a period ranging between seven and twenty years.

In addition to the law that allows for long prison sentences for children under 14 years of age, and its transformation into an emergency law for a period of five years, meaning that according to Israeli emergency laws it may be extended later, Israel has imposed several laws, most notably a law that obliges the Israeli government to spend a portion of Palestinian tax money monthly equivalent to the damages resulting from Palestinian operations in favor of what Israel calls the victims, and a law to dismiss employees in the education sector without prior notice, which deprives hundreds of employees and teachers of their financial rights and compensation, in addition to destroying their lives, in addition to two laws that prohibit and prevent the work of UNRWA and contact with it in areas that Israel claims are under its sovereignty. These laws, which are added to a previous law considering Jerusalem the capital of the occupied entity, come within the framework of the tense political atmosphere, and the exploitation of Israel and its most extreme right-wing government of the current security situation, in order to impose a policy of racist discourse against Palestinians and Arabs.

These laws, which extremist ministers are rushing to propose and prepare, greatly affect Palestinians and Arabs, target their public freedoms, gag them, and smell of revenge far from real legal justifications, especially the law to deport families in the section related to solidarity with the martyr or wounded, as the Knesset left the door wide open for the military and security services to arrest and punish anyone who offers condolences or expresses admiration or solidarity or publishes a picture or news, which gives the occupation’s interior minister greater leeway to implement unjust punitive campaigns against citizens, based on political and ideological orientations only.

In short, Israel has been resorting to a policy of collective punishment for many years, and now it is intensifying and tightening the measures related to this policy. The argument it always makes is that the Palestinians are terrorists, and they must be suppressed and their activities and movements must be limited, by enacting more racist laws that have no basis in truth.