The several hundred youths, who have lived in Israel for at least 10 years, who are about to complete high school (or some high school classes), and who are fit for military service, will receive the status of permanent residents. Those who are less veteran (at least five years) will receive the status of temporary residents.

The "accompanying" parents and younger siblings of the teenagers will be defined as "temporary residents," meaning they will not be expelled from the country.

The children of the migrant workers will remain, as they were before, ghost children: speaking Hebrew, playing with friends born here, but neither visible nor participating.

The interior minister's decision to grant these teenagers this new status is perplexing from every possible point of view. What is most strange is the principle tying the youths' civilian status to their ability, desire or fitness to serve in the army. What is the connection between civil rights and military service? The argument that "every Israeli citizen has to do military service" does not hold water. Even if this duty is anchored in law, it does not grant or negate rights.

Choosing the teenagers, whose families are described as "accompanying" them, is also strange. France and Germany, which granted citizenship to hundreds of thousands of guest workers over the past few years, gave full citizenship to entire families on the basis of different principles, mainly the parents' length of stay there and the fact that the children were born in Europe and had no other citizenship and cultural identity.

Minister Avraham Poraz is giving the youths permanent residency, a status that can be changed at any moment for any political reason. Their parents and siblings will not even get this status. A permanent resident can vote in municipal elections but not for the Knesset. In other words, these youths can serve in elite military units, may be forced to take part in evacuating settlers, let us say, but will not be able to influence their fates.

A permanent resident also does not get an Israeli passport, and unless he has a passport from his parents' place of birth, he could find himself without documents. This is in blatant contradiction to the UN Human Rights Covenant of 1946 that states that no person shall be without citizenship in the world.

The Shinui interior minister, who replaced his Shas predecessor with the pretension of ridding the country of ethnic and religious discrimination, is suddenly concerned with the feelings of the welfare minister from the National Religious Party - a strange mixture. The decision creates a precedent that allows Israel to continue treating the migrant workers disgracefully.

True, it will no longer be possible to expel those who have been "laundered," but they will not become citizens of the country.

The interior ministry officials' contention that it is not possible to compare the naturalization process in Israel with that in other countries, because of the Law of Return, reveals how weak Shinui is in the face of its imaginary struggle against the Orthodox monopoly. If the only way to become an Israeli citizen is by joining the Jewish people and if the state decides on humanitarian grounds to allow hundreds or thousands of migrant workers to strike roots in Israeli society, there is no choice but to open up to them the tribunals for religious conversion.

But Poraz also knows the state does everything possible to make it difficult to convert and that this route is basically blocked. In view of the policy it wishes to impose on the migrants, the Israeli government appears to be racist, ignoring the basic precepts of human rights. Worse, the state appears to want to have it all ways - to leave the foreign workers here, to impose inhuman difficulties on them, to make it impossible for them to become Israelis like everyone else - and after all this, to have the arrogance of calling itself enlightened.