“Of course, granting a small number of well behaved Palestinians citizenship in Israel is not a problem, and as it happens that occurs at a small scale all the time (e.g. family unification laws, east Jerusalem residents).
But there’s a number of issues with that:
No vetting is perfect, some terrorists/bad cultural fits will always slip through the gap.
Even if this person is a great cultural fit, there’s no guarantee their children will be, or that they won’t pull in other people through family unification laws.
There’s a risk of a democratic transition—the more Arab voters, the more power they have, the more they can open the gates to more Arabs, till Israel siezes to be a Jewish state.
We don’t trust the government to only keep it at a small scale.
Now let’s turn it around:
Why should we do this? What do we have to gain for taking on this risk?”
Putting on my reasonable Israeli nationalist hat:
“Of course, granting a small number of well behaved Palestinians citizenship in Israel is not a problem, and as it happens that occurs at a small scale all the time (e.g. family unification laws, east Jerusalem residents).
But there’s a number of issues with that:
No vetting is perfect, some terrorists/bad cultural fits will always slip through the gap.
Even if this person is a great cultural fit, there’s no guarantee their children will be, or that they won’t pull in other people through family unification laws.
There’s a risk of a democratic transition—the more Arab voters, the more power they have, the more they can open the gates to more Arabs, till Israel siezes to be a Jewish state.
We don’t trust the government to only keep it at a small scale.
Now let’s turn it around:
Why should we do this? What do we have to gain for taking on this risk?”