On 3 March 2025, the government published the draft of a bill to amend the Citizenship Law. This bill seeks to revoke the citizenship status of children of citizens who were born in countries defined as enemy states: Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Gaza Strip.

Similar to other legislative initiatives of the government and coalition parties submitted to the Knesset in recent months, this bill also takes advantage of the atmosphere prevailing among the Jewish public in Israel since the massacre committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing war raging since then to advance moves that deepen the discrimination against Palestinians and harm their rights.

This bill is an expansion of the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, enacted in 2003 as a “temporary provision” and extended annually since then with slight amendments. As it is, this law almost totally restricts the prospects of Palestinians in the territories who married Israelis to obtain status in Israel, unlike spouses of Israelis from other countries. The proposed amendment to the Citizenship Law seeks to add a new restriction that will deal yet another severe blow to human rights and the principle of equality, given that it is based on the treatment of Palestinian Israelis as second-class citizens.

The draft bill would particularly violate the rights of Israeli citizens to family life, to dignity, and to privacy. It would also harm the right to equality, as it differentiates between citizens and grants them dissimilar rights, based solely on their place of birth. The government alleges a security justification for this violation, but does not bother to present even a single piece of factual data to support its claim. In the absence of any factual basis for the proposed law, all that is left are unfounded generalities that can certainly not justify the sweeping harm to rights entailed in the proposed bill.

Zulat’s position is that the amendment to the Citizenship Law must be rejected out of hand, as it severely harms the rights to citizenship, family life, and the principle of equality. The flimsy explanations accompanying the bill reveal not only the unprofessional and sloppy job done by the Ministry of Interior that drafted it, but also prove that it does not come to solve a real problem. Instead, it is yet another one in a long series of populist bills introduced in the Knesset in recent months, promoting an inciteful and racist discourse and competing with each other as to which can cause more harm to Palestinian rights.

Even if most of these bills do not end up becoming law, they are dangerous because their mere discussion legitimizes the positions they represent, gradually eroding the basic principles of the regime in Israel and endorsing severe harm to human rights and the rule of law.