Israel's top court has upheld a law denying citizenship to Palestinians married to Israelis, with one judge saying it helped the Jewish state to fend off "suicide". By a 6-to-5 vote, the Supreme Court late on Wednesday rejected petitions against the 2003 ban, which civil rights activists denounced as racist for potentially forcing members of Israel's 20-percent Arab minority who wed Palestinians to emigrate.
Israel's former centrist government championed the ban on security grounds given Palestinian gun and bomb attacks. However, the law has also strained ethnic ties in Israel, whose leaders have long sought to shore up majority Jews. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, one of four petitioning groups, accused the court on Thursday of yielding to "the tyranny of the Knesset (parliament) majority".