John Martin Linton (born 11 August 1944) is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Battersea from 1997 to 2010. He visited the West Bank and Gaza in September 2007 with the Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group. Following that visit, Linton founded and currently chairs Labour Friends of Palestine & the Middle East. Martin Linton is parliamentary liaison for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD UK) (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Linton ).
Martin Linton on Apartheid Israel marriage laws violating fundamental Arab Israeli and Palestinian human rights (2011): “Raya is from Haifa and her husband Issam is from a village just 15 minutes' drive from the centre of Jerusalem, as close as Harrow to London. But he cannot live with his wife and children in their north Jerusalem home because his village lies outside the city limits. Under Israel's family unification law he cannot visit his children's school, nor even his wife when she was giving birth in hospital, because the school and the hospital are in Jerusalem and he's a West Banker. This is the law that the Israeli Supreme Court voted to uphold last week. It applies only to Arab Israelis. Jewish Israelis are free to marry and live with anyone they like (except Palestinians). The Israelis say it's because Palestinian spouses are a security risk. Palestinians say that the motive is ethnic engineering; that the Israelis will do anything to reduce the Arab population… Racism usually takes a more brazen form. It takes a particular cast of bureaucratic mind to use building permits and housing densities as tools of racial discrimination, but the Israelis have done it. Their policies are racist in everything but name and their system is apartheid in everything but name. Indeed a particularly cruel form of apartheid which works by making people's lives miserable, wearing them down, picking them off one by one. It is inaudible and invisible to the outside world until you look at the effects it has on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. As a country we protest to the Israelis that they breach international law - by annexing Jerusalem, by building settlements, by expropriating Palestinian land, building the wall inside the West Bank, by blockading Gaza. It is high time that we protested about this - their heartless treatment of ordinary families for no other reason than that they are Palestinian.” [1].
[1]. Martin Linton, “Israel’s law keeping Arab families apart”, New Statesman, 15 January 2012: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/01/palestinian-jerusalem-israel-family .