Editorial
Israel has crossed a troubling threshold. For the first time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used a 2023 law to strip citizenship from two Palestinians and deport them from Israel. This is not merely a legal procedure: it represents the formalization of transfer, the systematic removal of Palestinians from their homeland under the guise of security.
The law itself is discriminatory by design. It targets only Palestinians, whether they hold Israeli citizenship or residency in occupied East Jerusalem. No equivalent measure applies to Jewish Israelis. A Palestinian convicted or even charged with what Israel defines as terrorism can lose everything: citizenship, home, future. The criteria are deliberately vague, the process weighted against the accused.
Hassan Jabareen of Adalah calls this unprecedented in Western democracies. He is right. No democratic state revokes citizenship purely for political reasons, yet Netanyahu himself declares this is only the beginning. More Palestinians will follow. The message is clear: Palestinians are conditional citizens, their presence tolerated only so long as it serves Israeli interests.
This move arrives alongside other oppressive measures. Israel has approximately one hundred laws discriminating against Palestinians. The 2018 nation-state law enshrined Jewish supremacy. Recent death penalty proposals target Palestinians specifically. West Bank land seizures accelerate despite international condemnation. Meanwhile, violence surges within Israel itself: 252 of 300 murder victims in 2025 were Palestinian citizens, a crisis the state refuses to address.
The citizenship revocations expose Israel’s fundamental contradiction. It claims democracy while maintaining apartheid. It promises equality while legislating dispossession. Palestinians comprise twenty percent of Israel’s population, descendants of those who survived the 1948 expulsions. Now their children face renewed threats of removal.
Netanyahu frames this as security. History reveals it as ethnic cleansing by bureaucratic means. The international community must recognize this dangerous precedent before it becomes normalized practice. What begins with two deportations will not end there.
