Military Rule in Israel 1948-1966 (II)125 “The decision of the Israeli Supreme Court to uphold this law which allows housing discrimination against Palestinians is no surprise. It is part of the same containment policies as during the military regime; therefore, the court’s decision will result in the continued concentration and containment of the Palestinian population in Israel. It is a clear message from the Jewish State of Israel to its Arab citizens: stop asking or even dreaming of having Arabs in Jewish communities. In the past there was no need for commission committees because of two things; first, there was no need for any admission law, because no Palestinian would ever want to live in a Jewish-only community and, secondly, they knew that they would never be accepted. Every Palestinian child knows since early age that these are Jewish communities, Jewish villages or cities so there is no place for them. Only one Palestinian lawyer decided that, if Israel claims to be a democratic state,then he wants to live in a high quality village and to send his children to a good school, but this was part of the small parenthesis of the illusion of Israel becoming a normal State. The trick that Israel uses, like any other colonial state, is that it wants to maintain the homogeneity of the community; each community should be homogenous for the good of everyone. Their narrative is that it is good to have a poor neighborhood, a rich neighborhood, a Jewish one and an Arab one, and why mix them?” The other framework allowing for admission committees to decide which citizens can live in certain cities was created by the Israeli Parliament with the Admission Committees Law in 2011. The Law legitimized existing committees in 434 communities with fewer than 400 families in the Naqab (Negev) and in the Galilee, constituting approximately 43 percent of all residential areas in Israel.126 The Admission Committees Law makes it possible for the JewishIsraeli majority communities to reject people who want to move to such locations, if the latter fail to meet the “social suitability” criteria described in the law.127 A clause was added in the legislative hearings in order to forbid admission committees from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or disability. However, it is still possible for the members of the committees to discriminate, as long as they claim that candidates are rejected because they are found “unsuitable” to fit in with the community’s 125 BADIL’s interview with Michel Warchawski, founder of the Alternative Information Center, “Military Rule in Israel 1948-1966”, Jerusalem, October 2015 126 Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “Israeli Supreme Court upholds “Admission Committees Law” that allows Israeli Jewish communities to exclude Palestinian Arab citizens”, 17 September 2014. Available at: http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/8327; Human Rights Watch, “Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens”, 30 March 2011. Available at: www.hrw.org/ news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginalize-palestinian-arab-citizens 127 Human Rights Watch, “Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens”, 30 March 2011. Available at: www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginalize-palestinian-arab-citizens 36