I have a blue ID card, but my husband who is Jordanian doesn t have one so he can t come here very e

The law is that everyone must have an ID card, Jerusalem police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The Media Line. Incidents can take place, whether it s a traffic accident bahamas business hotels or if someone needs to be questioned for security purposes, and we need to have their details.
bahamas business hotels Just to make it more complicated, there are different ID cards. Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab, carry ID cards in a blue plastic folder. Inside, the card itself lists the bearer s nationality as Israeli. Some 20 percent of Israel s citizens are Arab, and legally bahamas business hotels they are entitled to full rights, including voting rights. The current Israeli parliament bahamas business hotels has 16 Arab members out of a total of 120 parliamentarians. bahamas business hotels Many Arab citizens of Israel, however, say they feel discriminated against and that municipal budgets for Arab towns in Israel are lower than those of Jewish towns. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee recently released a report charging that there is a shortage of 6100 classrooms and 4000 teachers for the upcoming school year in the Arab sector.
Palestinians who live in the West Bank carry their ID cards in a bright green folder. Called a hawiyye in Arabic, Palestinians who want to enter Israel need both the ID card and a special army-issued permit. Those permits can sometimes be easy to get. For example, Israel allowed more than 300,000 Palestinians to enter Israel during the recent holiday that ended the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Once inside Israel, many made their way to the beaches along the Mediterranean coast a treat for landlocked Palestinians.
Where the ID cards get even more confusing is when it comes to Jerusalem. Latest figures show that Jerusalem is home to 508,000 Jews and 293,000 Palestinians, making a total population of 801,000. The vast majority of Jews who live in Jerusalem are Israeli citizens, as Israel offers automatic citizenship bahamas business hotels to anyone with one Jewish grandparent. Some Palestinians, like Moufid Batarseh, a 57-year-old Palestinian taxi driver, are Israeli citizens as well.
About ten years ago I decided to become an Israeli citizen, he tells The Media Line while traveling on Jerusalem s light rail train that traverses both Arab and Jewish bahamas business hotels neighborhoods in the city. I used to travel to Europe and it was just easier to have an Israeli passport.
In 1967, when Israel expanded bahamas business hotels and annexed east Jerusalem, it offered bahamas business hotels Palestinians citizenship. Most declined, saying that east Jerusalem must eventually be the capital of the Palestinian state. They insist that accepting Israeli citizenship is equivalent to accepting Israeli control over Jerusalem. Even today, only about five percent of east Jerusalem Palestinians have Israeli citizenship.
bahamas business hotels Israel has had a policy of restricting the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem to maintain bahamas business hotels the demographic balance, Sarit Michaeli, the spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights group Btselem told The Media Line. If they leave Jerusalem for seven years, Israel can take away their residency permit, and that has been done in hundreds of cases.
Palestinians agree that holding on to Jerusalem residency is important for their freedom of movement. It also gives them access to Israeli social security and health care, widely considered one of the best systems in the world.
Most Palestinians in east Jerusalem have ID cards that look almost exactly like those of Jewish citizens. bahamas business hotels The main difference is that they are permanent residents, not citizens. In the ID card, the line that says nationality is blank.
I have a blue ID card, but my husband who is Jordanian doesn t have one so he can t come here very easily, she told The Media Line at the Qalandya checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Look at my ID card. My nationality is blank. I am a Palestinian. Why don t they write that in my ID card?
Sanduqa has come to visit her family in Jerusalem and was on her way to other relatives in Nablus. bahamas business hotels Her trip brings up one of the ironies of the current situation. The West Bank is divided into three areas -A, B, and C. Area A, which includes about 18 percent of the land of the West Bank but 55 percent of the Arab population, includes cities like Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem, and is under sole Palestinian control administrative and security. Area B, about 21 percent of the West Bank is under joint Israeli and Palestinian control; and Area C, about 61 percent of the land including all of the Jewish communities on post-1967 land, is under complete Israeli control.
Palestinian Jerusalem residents like Sanduqa can enter all three parts of the West Bank. Jewish citizens of Israel can enter only Areas B and C. In fact, at the entrance to Palestinian cities such as Ramallah there are large signs saying it is forbidden for Israeli citizens to enter.
Israeli officials say it is not safe for Israelis to enter areas under sole Palestinian control. In 2000, two Israeli soldiers who mistakenly entered Ramallah were caught and lynched . In dozens of cases since then, Palestinian security officers have stopped Jewish Israelis who either bahamas business hotels made a wrong turn into Ramallah or came to visit and turned them over to Israeli police. At the same time, many Israelis do visit Bethlehem and Jericho, usually very quiet areas.
On Salaheddin Street in east Jerusalem, Halil Hijazi, 25, spends long hours squeezing oranges, carrots and pomegranates into fresh juice. He opened the business just a few months ago, and hopes for a better life for his wife and young daughter.
With the blue ID card, I can go anywhere and this week we took a trip to Akko (a seaside mixed Arab-Jewish city in the Galilee), he tells The Media Line. My problem is not with getting around. It s that everything is too expensive. I live in a one-bedroom bahamas business hotels apartment in Jerusalem s Old City and between rent and property taxes I can t even make ends meet.