Israeli Woman Denied Public Benefits for Marrying Palestinian

An Israeli woman has been denied public benefits for years all for the "crime" of marrying a Palestinian man and visiting him in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli woman is identified simply as S. in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. She is from the town of Lod, which is a mixed Arab-Jewish town in Israel.

The married mother of four has been denied public benefits by the Israeli National Insurance Institute, which has also humiliated the woman for years.

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[Israeli Arabs. Courtney Kealey/Boston Globe.]

The NII denied her and her children health insurance and child allowances on the false grounds that S. does not live in Lod. S. owns an apartment in Lod, has two children in Lod school and works in the city's Health Maintenance Organization.

In spite of all this, an NII investigation 14 months ago ruled that S. does not live in Lod and that it is her responsible to appeal the investigation's conclusion and prove her residency. When she appealed, a representative at her local NII yelled at her and called her a liar who is just having children for the purpose of welfare handouts.

S.'s second attempt to approach the NII also ended with her being turned away by shouting clerks rejecting a residency document she had submitted.

A worker from the legal aid group Community Advocacy accompanied S. to the NII with the appeal and a thick file of documents, which the NII rejected the same day.

Sigalit Givon-Fadida, director of the Lod Community Advocacy branch, said dozens of their clients had been humiliated by NII clerks, which regularly "prevented people from being innocent until proven guilty."

Even though her identity is not identified, it is obvious that S. is an Arab citizen of Israel. This is how Israel treats 23% of its citizenry all because they are non-Jews.

An apartheid state, indeed!