RECENT ISRAELI MARRIAGE LAW

More on Israel's recent marriage law from Josh Cherniss here and here, in dialogue with Eliana Johnson here and here. (Thanks to Will Baude for initally alerting me to Eliana's comments.) As is necessary, the discussion encompasses a lot of important things, but it seems to me worthwhile to focus on the particular law in question: a one-year moratorium on Israeli citizenship for Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs.

I'm not sitting in the Knesset so I haven't heard all of the testimony, but I find it hard to believe that this law can really be justified as a security measure, as opposed to as a measure intended to raise the costs of obtaining Israeli citizenship in the interest of either discouraging Palestinians from attempting to become Israeli citizens or laying the groundwork for additional restrictions in the future (if these ones are politically palatable). Cross-national marriages seem to me to be one area where the power of the state is excercised largely for ascriptive reasons (to borrow a term from Rogers Smith) that impose actual hardship on real people who simply had the "bad luck" of falling in love across national borders. My sentiments here aren't nearly as interesting as Josh's and Eliana's, though, so go read their posts.