Recent reports of human rights groups highlight the following issues that frame the contemporary landscape of residency rights for Palestinians:5 • The impact of revocation (and risk of revocation) of residency permit(s). • The rejection of applications for family unification between those in Jerusalem or Israel, and in the remainder of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since 2000, Israel suspended at least 120,000 applications for family unification.6 As a result, many families are forced to either live apart, or live ‘illegally’ together and under constant risk of arrest. • Child registration across the occupied Palestinian territory (including East Jerusalem). The number of unregistered children is currently unknown, but estimates place the number at around 10,000. The impact, though, remains high since children are unable to access basic services and social benefits. • The precarious residency status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. This problematic landscape is the result of numerous legal regulations and formulations, and it is very easy to become lost in the details, statistics and terminologies. However, there is an underlying ideological structure that regulates the Israeli policies in this regard. Whereas Nationality and Citizenship are usually used interchangeably (e.g. a citizen of Italy is an Italian national), Israel makes a clear legal distinction between the two. There is no Israeli Nationality, a stance that has been legally grounded in the decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court.7 Jewish nationality, however, is recognized and is governed by the Law of Return (1950),8 which automatically assigns the right for “Jewish nationality” to every Jewish individual anywhere in the world. According to the Law of Return, a Jewish national is born to a Jewish mother – or has converted to Judaism – and is not a member of any 10 5 Human Rights Watch, “Forget About Him, He”s Not Here’: Israel’s Control of Palestinian Residency in the West Bank and Gaza (Jerusalem: Human Rights Watch, February 2012), http://www.hrw.org/ sites/default/files/reports/iopt0212webwcover.pdf; Noga Kadman and Beth Pearson, Families Torn Apart, Separation of Palestinian Families in the Occupied Territory (Jerusalem: B’Tselem - HAMOKED, July 1999), http://www.hamoked.org/items/10700_eng.pdf; OCHA, Special Focus: East Jerusalem Key Humanitarian Concerns (Jerusalem: OCHA - United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs occupied Palestinian territory, March 2011), http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL. NSF/0/0D90191FBC1DDBC88525785C004DF7A5; Yael Stein, The Quiet Deportation: Revocation of Residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Jerusalem: B’Tselem - HAMOKED, April 1997), http://www. btselem.org/printpdf/65978. 6 B’Tselem, Perpetual Limbo: Israel’s Freeze on Unification of Palestinian Families in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem- The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, July 2006). 7 George Raphael Tamarin v. State of Israel (HCJ 1972); Ouzi Arnan et al v. State of Israel (HCJ 2013). 8 The State of Israel, The Law of Return, 5710, 1950, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4ea1b.html.