Salwa Abu Jaber believes her story shows Israel discriminating against its Arab citizens, 60 years after the state was established as a haven for Jews.
The 32-year-old mother of four from northern Israel said her five-year-old daughter has never seen her father, who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Separated from the man for five years, she says she has been forced to divorce him.
Thousands of families have been similarly split by a 2003 ban on Palestinians in the West Bank from reuniting with their families inside Israel, imposed citing security reasons after the Palestinian uprising or intifada began in 2000.
"In practical terms, Israel forced the divorce on us," Abu Jaber said. "We could not continue to live like this any longer. If this is not racism, then what is it?"
This week, as Israel celebrates the anniversary of its foundation, its supreme court has said it found merit in the position of numerous petitions filed by rights groups against the law that keeps the families apart.
But Israeli Arabs - those Palestinians who remained after hundreds of thousands fled or were expelled from their homes when Israel was created - say institutionalized racism and illegal killings of Arabs have increased since the intifada started.
After 1948, about 120,000 stayed and were granted Israeli citizenship. Now about one in five Israelis is Arab, and many prefer to be called Palestinians like their kin outside Israel.
Israel denies it discriminates and touts its credentials as a multi-cultural democracy, arguing all citizens have the vote and are equal under the law. Arabic is an official language, alongside Hebrew.
Arabs say they also struggle to get jobs, housing and land.
"Arab citizens ... are related to more as enemies than as citizens with equal rights," the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in its annual report.
The group said "racist incidents" against Arab citizens rose 26 percent in 2006. It did not have more recent figures. Poverty rates are four times higher among Israeli Arabs in comparison to Israeli Jews, according to Haifa-based advocacy group Mossawa.
Twelve Arab lawmakers including a cabinet member hold seats in Israel's 120-member parliament, but less than 8 percent of the country's civil service workforce is made up of Israeli Palestinians, according to a recent civil service report.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The Israeli government acknowledges the gap between the Israeli Jews and Arabs and says it is taking affirmative action to boost the number of Arab civil servants to 10 percent by 2012, particularly in high-ranking posts.
"Israeli Arabs enjoy more freedom, more civil rights that any of their compatriots across the borders," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, said.
But some rights groups, including ACRI, say Israel has also been using the law to cement the state's Jewish character.
Such draft bills, approved by parliament in 2007, include banning Arabs from buying land controlled by the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental group that was founded before the state of Israel to buy and develop land in Palestine and later oversaw land distribution in the Jewish state.
