AKA: SIPPENHAFT

After the meeting, the cabinet, which includes Israel's top politicians--Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin--published a short list of its plans to "extract a price from terrorists and their supporters." In addition to promises to seal and demolish the Neve Yaakov assailant's house (sealing ensures that the family cannot enter the home or collect their possessions before demolition), boost the Israeli army and police forces' capabilities to carry out mass arrests, and make it easier for Israeli civilians to acquire gun licenses, the cabinet put forth an unprecedented proposal: a pledge to revoke certain fundamentals of Israeli citizenship or residency rights, like national insurance benefits and Israeli ID cards, from the family members of those convicted of terrorism. ​​On Twitter, Smotrich wrote, "If the terrorist's entire family were deported to Gaza without an identity card and without social rights . . . no one would be proud of the terrorist and what he did to his family."

"It makes Israel's national insurance, which is meant to be a welfare agency, into an arm of the security force," said Jessica Montell, the CEO of the Israeli human rights group HaMoked: The Center for the Defense of the Individual. "This is a huge expansion of collective punishment." Because the recent violence against Jewish Israeli civilians was perpetrated by East Jerusalem Palestinians, families there are likely the primary targets for the cabinet's new plans. Montell said that the government's plans indicate the extent to which the current far-right Israeli government sees Palestinians who live in Israel and East Jerusalem not as members of a shared polity but rather as provisional citizens or temporary residents.

When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it gave Palestinians living there residency rights, which include the basic package of rights that all citizens receive--medical insurance, allowances for children, unemployment benefits, and physical and mental disability benefits--but exclude the right to vote in national elections. 

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