The blue identity card that Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents carry does not confer citizenship. It does not grant a passport. What it grants is the right to live in the city where, in many cases, a person’s family has lived for generations. And that right can be taken away by an Interior Ministry clerk acting on a bureaucratic determination that the cardholder has been absent too long — or has simply made the mistake of building a life somewhere else while trying to preserve the one they had.
This is the system of permanent residency as applied to Palestinian Jerusalemites — a legal status that sounds secure and is not, a form of belonging that the Israeli state can dissolve, and that it has dissolved, more than fourteen thousand times since 1967.
A Status Created by Occupation, Governed by Discretion
When Israel occupied East Jerusalem in June 1967 and subsequently annexed the city in a move never recognized by international law, the Palestinian population was not granted Israeli citizenship. Instead, roughly 66,000 Palestinians were registered as permanent residents — the same legal category used for foreign nationals who have immigrated to Israel and been granted long-term residency. The classification was not incidental. It meant that Palestinian Jerusalemites held a status that, unlike citizenship, carries no guarantee of permanence and is subject to revocation at the Interior Ministry’s discretion.
The legal instrument governing revocation is the Entry into Israel Law of 1952, a statute designed for immigrant populations, now applied to people who never immigrated anywhere. Under this framework, Palestinian Jerusalemites can lose their residency if the Interior Ministry determines that they have “settled” abroad — a determination that has, in practice, been applied to Palestinians who studied in other countries, worked abroad to support families at home, or moved to Palestinian Authority-administered areas of the West Bank that Israel does not consider part of Israel at all.
The ‘Center of Life’ Test and How It Is Used
Since the mid-1990s, the Interior Ministry has formalized its revocation criteria around what it calls the “center of life” test. To maintain residency, a Jerusalemite must demonstrate that Jerusalem is the primary center of their life — through evidence of employment, property, bank accounts, children’s schooling, and continuous physical presence. The burden of proof falls on the resident, not the state.
The practical consequences are severe. A Palestinian student who accepts a university place abroad may return to find their residency under review. A worker who spends several years in the Gulf to save money — a common economic reality across the occupied territories — risks the same outcome. A woman who moves to her husband’s home in Ramallah or Bethlehem and later returns to Jerusalem may be told she no longer qualifies to live there. In each case, the Interior Ministry does not need to argue that the person has renounced Jerusalem. It only needs to argue that Jerusalem was not, at some administrative moment, the center of their daily life.
HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, the Israeli human rights organization that has litigated hundreds of residency revocation cases, has documented the cumulative scale of the policy. According to HaMoked’s records, Israel revoked the residency of approximately 14,500 Palestinian Jerusalemites between 1967 and 2020. The revocations were not evenly distributed across time: a sharp spike occurred during the late 1990s, particularly between 1996 and 1999, when thousands of residencies were cancelled in a concentrated administrative push. HaMoked has described this pattern as a form of quiet deportation — the removal of a population not through expulsion orders but through the bureaucratic erasure of their legal right to remain.
Family Separation as Policy Outcome
One of the most direct human consequences of the residency system is the fracturing of families. Because residency is not automatically transferred to spouses or children, Palestinian Jerusalemites who marry residents of the West Bank or Gaza face a bureaucratic obstacle that can last years or prove permanently insurmountable.
Israeli law does allow for family reunification applications, but since 2003 the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law — initially passed as a temporary order and renewed by the Knesset repeatedly since — has effectively frozen most such applications for Palestinians from the occupied territories. The practical effect is that a Jerusalemite who marries a West Banker must either establish the family in Jerusalem while the spouse navigates an indefinitely suspended application process, or relocate to the West Bank and risk triggering a center-of-life review that could cost the Jerusalemite their own residency. Amnesty International and HaMoked have both documented this bind in detail, describing it as a policy that structurally coerces Palestinian Jerusalemites into leaving the city to form normal family lives.
Children born to a Jerusalem-resident parent do not automatically receive residency if the other parent holds a different status. Registration of children has itself been a source of documented bureaucratic delay, leaving some children in administrative limbo — present in the city, enrolled in schools, but without formal status — while applications work through a system that HaMoked has characterized as deliberately slow and opaque.
‘Quiet Deportation’ in the Broader Context of Jerusalem Policy
The residency revocation system does not operate in isolation. It is one mechanism within a broader set of Israeli policies in East Jerusalem that UN bodies, human rights organizations, and legal scholars have documented as systematically reducing the Palestinian population of the city or constraining its growth. These include highly restrictive zoning and planning rules that, as Ir Amim and Bimkom have documented, leave the vast majority of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods with inadequate legal building space; the expansion of Israeli settlements in and around East Jerusalem, which the UN Security Council addressed in Resolution 2334 (2016); and inequitable provision of municipal services to Palestinian as compared to Israeli neighborhoods in the city.
Residency revocation fits within this landscape because the threat of losing status functions as a form of pressure — on educational choices, on where families can build homes, on whether a Jerusalemite can spend extended time abroad without jeopardizing everything. Scholars including Rashid Khalidi have written about the cumulative, structural character of this pressure, describing Israeli policy in Jerusalem as a long-running effort to alter the demographic composition of the city in ways that prejudice a future political resolution.
For the Palestinian Jerusalemites navigating this system, the stakes are not abstract. They are a blue card kept in a drawer, a child whose school registration depends on it, a decision about whether to accept a job offer abroad, and the calculation — made by people who should not have to make it — of how much ordinary life they can live before the city they are from decides they no longer belong to it.
Sources
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual — residency revocation data and case documentation
- Entry into Israel Law, 1952 (Israel)
- Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), 2003, and subsequent renewals (Israel)
- Amnesty International — reporting on family reunification restrictions and Palestinian residency
- Ir Amim — documentation on East Jerusalem planning and zoning policy
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights — East Jerusalem planning rights documentation
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016)
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Human Rights Watch — reporting on East Jerusalem residency and demographic policy
