Germany has some of the strictest citizenship laws on the books, in fact duel citizenship is prohibited per their constitution. They do have a procedure you can go through to get special permission, “Beibehaltungsgenehmigung” which you MUST do if you are considering taking another citizenship in addition to your German citizenship. If you don’t go through this procedure, which may work and may NOT work, then too bad, so sad, you forfeit your German citizenship if you take another without going through the procedure and MAYBE being allowed to hold duel citizenship. A few years ago Germany did ease up their citizenship laws allowing duel citizenship with other EU countries, but Israel is not an EU country.

There are tons of cognates between Hebrew and Arabic, so much so that I can sometimes catch the gist of what is being said when I hear Hebrew. And then, of course, the Israelis have stolen their swear words, including some pretty bad ones, from Arabic. :o}

…the way it was explained to me when I was researching Kill Khalid was that often what happens is, the Israeli authorities borrow passports momentarily, as people go through immigration, entering or leaving Israel, and skim the details of them. But another thing that happens is, given the number of Jews from other parts of the world, other countries, who migrate to Israel, they have dual citizenship, they have American passports, they have Canadian, British passports, whatever. Now, one of the things that happens is, quite a few of those people are given, if you like, an informal test of their loyalty to the state of Israel and in the form of a request for their passport to be borrowed for a time.

There was an amazing case, again in the aftermath of the Mishal incident, where a Canadian came forward to the Canadian authorities and confessed that in 1996 he had actually let the Israeli authorities borrow his passport. In the aftermath of the Mishal incident, the Israelis apologized profusely to Canada and promised that they would not use Canadian passports again. But weeks later, this same Canadian had a knock on his door from what he described as a front for the Mossad. He was asked, could they borrow his new passport, and could they also fly his daughter to Ottawa to apply for a new passport and then fly her back to Israel, and could they borrow that passport, too.