Israeli ban is upheld

JERUSALEM -- The Supreme Court upheld a law yesterday that bars many Palestinians from living in Israel with Israeli spouses and children, a landmark ruling that security concerns outweigh concerns for such families.

Critics accused the court of defending racist legislation aimed at restricting the number of Arab citizens in Israel.

But the government said there was evidence that some West Bank Palestinians who married Israeli Arab women took part in terror attacks.

In other developments yesterday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed six Palestinian militants in West Bank arrest raids, the Israeli navy stopped a Palestinian boat loaded with high-grade explosives headed for Gaza, and a Florida teenager died of wounds received last month in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

The court case, decided by an unusually large panel of 11 justices, centered on two of the touchiest issues that have been facing Israel for decades -- balancing security and human rights, and maintaining the state's Jewish identity while dealing fairly with a large Arab minority.

The answers are never clear-cut, as reflected by the 6-5 vote to uphold the law, which bans Palestinian women under the age of 25 and men under 35 from living in Israel with their Israeli Arab spouses.

The restrictions, imposed in 2002 at the height of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, are believed to have kept hundreds, and possibly thousands, of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians from moving to Israel. Exact numbers are not known.

State prosecutor Yochi Genessin said the state has granted 6,000 of 22,000 requests for family unification since Israel and the Palestinians signed an interim peace deal in 1993.

Some were rejected for security reasons, she said.

The law was enacted after a Palestinian who had acquired Israeli citizenship killed himself and 14 other people in a suicide bombing of a Haifa restaurant in 2002.

''This is a very black day for the state of Israel, and also a black day for my family and for the other families who are suffering like us," said Murad el-Sana, an Israeli Arab lawyer married to a Palestinian woman from the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

The court had granted Sana's wife, Abir, a temporary injunction preventing her expulsion from Israel. But Sana said the high court's ruling made it almost impossible for the couple and their two children to continue to live together.

Justice Minister Haim Ramon of the centrist Kadima Party defended the ruling.

''No place in the world is required to admit citizens from a country or authority with which it is in a state of conflict," he said. ''We have to remember that this law was legislated during the Palestinian uprising, when several people who received citizenship through family unification carried out attacks."

The restrictions also cut to a sensitive demographic issue -- the fear that the country's Jewish majority could be threatened if too many Palestinians are granted citizenship.

Arabs account for nearly 20 percent of Israel's population of 7 million, while nearly 4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In a minority opinion, Chief Justice Aharon Barak argued that the law should be overturned because security concerns should not take precedence over basic civil rights.

But the majority opinion, led by Justice Mishael Cheshin, contended that ''the benefit it [the law] brings to the security and lives of the residents of Israel outweighs the harm it causes to some citizens of Israel."

Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian intelligence officer and five other men during raids in the West Bank town of Jenin and the nearby village of Qabatiyeh, Palestinian security officials said.

The army said that in both places troops seeking to carry out arrests were fired on and returned the fire.