56 chapter two courts conclude that a civil wrong was perpetrated, it can order payments in sums of up to 30,000 New Israeli Shekels (NIS) to the ‘injured’ party in damages. Foreign citizens violating the law could be denied entry into Israel for 10 years.16 Important to note is that any boycott against products manufactured in illegal West Bank settlements is also considered an attack on Israeli goods and therefore criminalized under this law. In other words, the illegally occupied lands in the West Bank are here considered part of the state and economic regime of Israel.17 Rendering the support or propagation of boycotts an actionable civil wrong, this law effectively prevents many civil society and advocacy groups from engaging in non-violent political actions of this form. Further, it denies both Arab and Jewish citizens and residents of Israel the right to actively and openly refuse to support criminal and other problematic Israeli groups, corporations and institutions fuelling the occupation of Palestinian-owned lands. vii. Loyalty Oath Bill Seeking to extort from Palestinian citizens acceptance of the principle that Israel is a Jewish state, the amendment to The Citizenship Law (1952) 16 Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, New Discriminatory Laws. 17 Integration of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank into the Israeli social, legal and territorial corpus was further deepened with two major developments in December 2012. First, after various legal battles, the majority vote of the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria to grant full university status to the Ariel University Center took full effect. This move renders Ariel University Center Israel’s eighth accredited university and includes a gradual increase of the institution’s annual government funding. As the fourth largest illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Ariel interrupts the territorial integrity of any future Palestinian State based on the pre-1967 borders, as it blocks access between major Palestinian towns in the south and those villages to the north of the settlement. Yet, despite this territorial reality, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated that “Ariel is an inseparable part of Israel and it will remain that way under any future agreement.” Moreover, in what most observers identified as a response to the United Nations approval of the Palestinian bid for non-member observer state status, the Israeli government officially agreed to the building of 3,000 housing units in the contentious area known as E1; an area of the West Bank that runs between and connects the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem to the mega-settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. Building in this area would create a large block of contiguous Israeli settlements effectively slicing the West Bank into a northern and southern part, and would limit travel to Ramallah and Bethlehem to only narrow corridors around Ma’ale Adumim – far from the Old City and Jerusalem. See Barak Ravid, “Israel’s cabinet votes to recognize Ariel college as accredited university,” Haaretz, September 9, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-s-cabinet-votes-to -recognize-ariel-college-as-accredited-university-1.463690; Al Jazeera English, “Israel rejects outcry over settlement plan,” December 04, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/­middle east/2012/12/2012123101816967394.html; Jerusalem Post, “Israel okays building of 3,000 units in Jerusalem, W. Bank,” November 30, 2012, http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAnd Politics/Article.aspx?id=294118.