Israeli legal experts said the United States Supreme Court's ruling on Monday allowing a U.S. immigrant couple to advance a decade-long lawsuit to list their son's birthplace as "Jerusalem, Israel" could open the floodgates to similar demands and overturn a long-standing U.S. State Department policy.

David Baker, a former legal expert for the Israeli foreign ministry, told Xinhua Tuesday that the "precedent-setting" ruling "could bring about a whole wave of claims by people who have been refused in the past to have their requests approved," and noted that a similar case was making its way through the Canadian court system.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has considered Jerusalem as its "sovereign and eternal capital," and pro-Israel groups have been lobbying for overturning the "discriminatory" U.S. policy that refuses to list Israel as the birthplace on U.S. citizens' passports. However, the U.S. State Department insisted on the policy, in deference to objections by the Palestinians, who want the eastern part of Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Naomi and Ari Zivotofsky, who settled in Israel in 2000, filed a suit in a U.S. federal court in Washington in 2003 on behalf of their son Menachem, who was born in West Jerusalem, protesting the U.S. policy and asking for enforcement of a law passed a year earlier by the U.S. Congress that allowed for such a listing.

In Monday's decision, Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court said that "Zivotofsky does not ask the courts to determine whether Jerusalem is the capital of Israel," but merely whether Zivotofsky could have the right "to have Israel recorded on his passport as his place of birth."

"The courts are fully capable of determining whether this statute may be given effect, or instead must be struck down in light of authority conferred on the executive by the Constitution, " Roberts said.

The ruling could potentially affect some 50,000 dual-national American citizens here, Israeli experts estimated.

The couple's lawyer, Alyza Lewin, said the U.S. State Department's policy was "discriminatory."

"The State Department has complied with the requests of individuals who were born in Haifa or Tel Aviv and whose personal preference is to remove 'Israel' from their U.S. passports, or even with the requests of those born in pre-1948 Israel who prefer to have 'Palestine' listed on their passport," she said.

Abe Foxman, director of the U.S. Anti-Defamation League, said that "We are gratified that the Supreme Court will let the Zivotofskys pursue their effort to list 'Israel' as their son's place of birth on his American passport."

"We are pleased that the Supreme Court has directed a lower court to review the law's constitutionality. The lower court should find, as we argued in our coalition brief, that the purpose of a passport is for identification, not to set or implement foreign policy. The Congress acted within its power when it gave individuals like the Zivotofskys the option to list their son's place of birth as Israel," Foxman said, according to the Ynet news site.