Yaakov Halul doesn't know it, but on Monday he made history. Or to be more precise, history was made in his name. The two-year-old from the village of Jish became Israel's first Aramean citizen this week. Yaakov's parents, Shadi and Oksana Halul, arrived at the Interior Ministry in Safed on Monday and received Yaakov's birth certificate, the first in Israel that listed a baby's ethnicity as "Aramean." Some 130,000 Arameans live in Israel, mainly in villages in the Galilee. Until recently, when a long public campaign ended in a decision by the Interior Ministry to recognize the Aramean people as a separate ethnicity, they were listed as Arabs on identification documents. "Since the baby was born, my wife and I have refused to get him a birth certificate on which he'd be listed as an Arab," Shadi Halul said. "He was a kind of alien. No document. No identity." Shadi, 38, who served as a captain in the IDF Paratroopers Brigade, today chairs the Aramean-Christian Association in Israel. "For seven years I have led, along with my friends, the fight to have the Aramean ethnicity recognized and we finally saw it happen. We have preserved the honor of a great people that has survived for thousands of years, despite attacks by different peoples," he said. "We always knew that the Jewish people would be the ones to understand us and give us status as an ethnic group. It's a great moment not only for us, but also for the Jewish people, a noble people we live with who knew to give us this justified gift. From now on, every Aramean Christian baby born in Israel will be given an ID card listing him as an Aramean, not an Arab. Every Aramean Christian adult listed as an Arab on his ID card can go to the Interior Ministry and present a court order to have his ethnicity changed from Arab to Aramean," Shadi continued. On Tuesday, a special ceremony celebrating the official recognition of the Aramean people was scheduled to take place at the Marriott Hotel in Nazareth. Interior Minister Gideon Saar was expected to attend.
