Yossi Klein Halevi is an Israeli writer and a fellow of the “Engaging Israel Project” at the Shalom Hartman Center in Jerusalem. I called him up to talk about the recent Israeli Supreme Court decision that extended a 2002 law banning Palestinian spouses of Israeli Arabs from living in Israel. Halevi said he really did not want to do an interview about this subject. Because, he said, it’s such fraught issue. But he was gracious enough to go ahead and talk with me anyway. When he read the news about the court decision, Halevi said he felt “torn apart” by it. He knows Palestinians who will be affected by the ruling. And yet, he said he still understood why the justices ruled the way they did. Halevi said security was not the biggest factor in the decision. It was demographics, he said. Here is Halevi’s response to the charge that the court ruling adds up to legally enshrined racism.
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