Briefing Paper September 2019 (9)
Living in psychological limbo Amira Hass Ha’aretz 1/6/19
Living in legal limbo for more than 40 years, Maryam Ibrahim has not been allowed to live in her native West Bank village of Beit Furik with her husband and in recent years, Israel hasn’t allowed her to visit — Sa‘adi Khatatbeh and Maryam Ibrahim have been married for 40 years. He is 62 and she is 59. They have five children and many grandchildren. They were both born in the village of Beit Furik southeast of Nablus in the northern West Bank and belong to the same extended family. With the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Ibrahim family was in Amman. They remained there in the period following the war and were not included in the West Bank population registry that Israeli authorities created based on a population census carried out during the summer that year. Maryam Ibrahim is therefore a Jordanian citizen, while Khatatbeh, her husband, who was in the West Bank at the time, has permanent resident status there. Marriage within the same extended family or among residents of the same village is very common in the West Bank and 40 years ago it was even more prevalent. The custom is stronger than the artificial boundaries created by wars.And like tens of thousands of other “mixed” families in which either the husband or wife is not a permanent resident of the West Bank, they live in legal, social and psychological limbo…
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