Israel’s 2003 law forced Arab citizens marrying Palestinians out of the country.

Evidence

In August 2003, Israel introduced a disturbing new law: In the name of security, of not wanting to be overrun demographically, and so of the untouchable Jewish logic of survival, any Arab Israeli citizen marrying a Palestinian would be required to move to the Palestinian territories to live, or to leave the country altogether. Ethnoracial purging – deeply connected to but subtly differentiated from ethnic cleansing – is the process of removing, evicting (what Ghada Karmi calls “vanishing”) almost all Palestinians identified as such from green-line Israel. Since 1967, the Arab population of Jerusalem has declined from 72 to 28 percent. Palestinians born, bred, and residing on property they have long owned within the boundaries of “Jewish Jerusalem” are declared by the state residents of the West Bank. They may be registered accordingly as “absentee landlords” in the very houses in which they (illegally) reside, their property subject to confiscation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 609

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines ‘ethnoracial purging’ as distinct from ethnic cleansing.
• CANDY: The ‘absentee landlords in their own homes’ irony is a striking cocktail-party fact.