Non-Jewish Immigrants Forcing Israel to Choose Between Being a “Jewish” State and a Democracy

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The Law of Return—which permits Jews to emigrate freely to Israel and defines who is eligible for such immigration in the broadest terms, including those who are the grandchildren of a Jew—must be tightened to prevent an influx of non-Jewish immigrants who will threaten the Jewish nature of the state, says Eli Yishai, leader of the Shas Party.

In December, Shas activists in Beit Shemesh publicly accused immigrants from the former Soviet Union of bringing “diseases” into the country and “flooding Beit Shemesh with abomination.” Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Moshe Abutul (Shas) went further, raising the possibility of “separate towns for Russian gentiles.”

The fact that as many as 50 percent of recent immigrants are not halachically (according to Orthodox Jewish law) Jewish has led Yishai to the view that immigration laws must be tightened. “There’s no doubt hundreds of thousands of additional non-Jews will make cooperation between Israelis very difficult,” he warned.

Yishai’s top priority is the removal of the clause in the Law of Return which affords grandchildren of Jews the right to immigrate. The original law guaranteed Israeli citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world. In 1970, it was amended to include those with Jewish roots and connections: non-Jewish spouses, children and grandchildren of Jews. This was a deliberate reverse mirroring of the Nazi definition of Jewishness. It meant to create a law that would embrace those who might not consider themselves Jewish but might nonetheless face anti-Semitism.

Tens of thousands of non-Jews enter Israel on this basis, Yishai said. The conspicuous increase in incidents of incitement against new immigrants from the former Soviet Union is leading a growing number of Knesset members to believe that the time is ripe to discuss a reform of the Law of Return. Several members of the Knesset said the only way to ensure the longevity of the Jewish people in Israel is by abolishing the section of the law which offers the right of return to the non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews. United Torah Judaism’s MK Shmuel Halpert described non-Jewish immigrants as a “fifth column.”

“Boy, are we talking about a lot of goyim—and they’ll all end up in Israel.”

Aba Dunner, executive director of communications for the Conference of European Rabbis, warns that if the precarious economic situation in the former Soviet Union should decline, the immigration could become an unstoppable tidal wave: “If they don’t change the Law of Return and the economy here goes down the tubes, you’re going to have five million goyim sitting in Eretz Yisrael. There’s no doubt about it. That’s the thing that Israel ought to be very careful about because these Jews will have a lot of goyim in their families—and boy, are we talking about a lot of goyim—and they’ll all end up in Israel.”

Minister Michael Melchior, who is responsible for diaspora affairs, has suggested amending the grandchild clause in the Law of Return to bar immigrants if they come without their Jewish grandparents, and changing the paragraph that pertains to converts to allow only their nuclear family to accompany them.

Under Orthodox Jewish law, only persons with Jewish mothers or converts are considered Jews. Although 85 percent of immigrants in the early part of the decade were halachically Jewish, according to immigration officials, in the past two years, non-Jews have constituted just over 50 percent. Overall, 75 percent of Russian-speaking immigrants of the past decade are halachically Jewish. A Russian immigrant journalist on a press tour in December to Minsk and Vilna organized by the Jewish Agency estimated that 80 percent of participants in Agency-sponsored youth programs in the former Soviet Union are non-Jews.

The demonstration in Beit Shemesh by ultra-Orthodox Jews was sparked, in part, by the proliferation of shops selling pork. Decrying the growing assaults against non-Jewish immigrants, a group of prominent Russian-speaking immigrants, including former Prisoners of Zion like Yosef Begun and Vladimir Slepak, issued a statement accusing “xenophobes and racists” among Russian immigrants of having formed an alliance with religious extremists within Israeli society to defame the non-Jewish immigrants. “Any attempt to change the Law of Return is likely to lead to the country exchanging its democratic values for a fundamentalist religious value system based on race or blood,” said the statement.

“Critical Mass”

The best known immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky, now interior minister, believes that the emigration of non-Jews should be curbed. While non-Jews totaled only 15 percent of immigrants in the early years of mass immigration, he said, this trend changed dramatically three years ago, when they began to form a “critical mass.” These people are not bound to the rest of the nation, he said. “Until now we’ve worked…to draw in more and more immigrants,” he said. “The time has come to change the emphasis and create the glue that will promote affinity on the grounds of shared tradition.”

Since the Orthodox religious establishment has total control over such questions as marriage, the non-Jewish immigrants have found it difficult to marry, as no such thing as civil marriage exists and marriage across religious lines is virtually impossible unless the couple involved leaves the country to marry elsewhere. In January, the ultra-Orthodox Degel Hatora party said it was willing to agree to civil marriage—but only for non-Jewish immigrants, as long as it was not for Jews.

Knesset member Moshe Gafni said his party had been holding talks with Yisrael Ba’aliya in an effort to solve the problem. At present, those who are not recognized as Jews by the rabbinate and do not want to be married by a Christian clergyman must go abroad if they want their marriage to be legally registered. According to Gafni, the problem was not to allow civil marriage for non-Jews but to find a way in which this form of marriage would not be exploited by non-Orthodox Jews. What he feared was that if any form of civil marriage were approved, the non-Orthodox would immediately petition the High Court of Justice in an effort to extend it to Jews as well. Gafni also rejected any suggestion that non-Jews and Jews might marry each other under such a solution. “We live in a Jewish state and we don’t want the state to encourage intermarriage,” he said.

A Growing Contradiction

The larger question confronting the Israeli society is the increasingly apparent contradiction between being a “democratic” state and being a “Jewish” one.

In the Knesset, a bill was recently submitted by Muhammad Baraka, an Israeli-Arab legislator, which proposed to anchor in law the assertion that Israel is a democratic and multi-cultural state. Parliament’s legal advisers, however, considered the bill so subversive that they recommended that it not be sent to the floor for debate. The New York Times reports that, “Mr. Baraka’s proposal, it seems, cleverly omits a sacred point: that Israel values one culture above all others…Whether parliament lets the multiculturalism bill proceed and be voted down remains to be seen. But inside and outside the legislature, the debate is already raging, a national soul-search about Israel’s identity and just how central Jewishness—much less Judaism—should be.”

Israel has yet to confront the religious extremism which preaches hatred of those who are not Jewish. An important thinker for the ultra-Orthodox, for example, is Judah Halevi, a Jewish poet and philosopher of the 12th century who wrote of history’s selection process in his famous work The Kuzari.

“The best known things in it are racist,” declared Elhanan Naeh, a professor of Talmud at Hebrew University and the Jerusalem branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary. “He says Abraham was the best of men but he contained in himself some bad elements, and these bad elements came out in the form of Ishmael.”

Since Ishmael is today considered a forefather of the Arab nation and the link through which the Arabs trace their origins to Abraham, his manner of treatment in religious sources has contemporary relevance. To Professor Naeh, Judah Halevi’s 12th century writings reinforce the Jewish ethnocentrism found in the Bible. “It’s very dangerous,” he said of the often-cited Halevi thesis of the inferiority of Ishmael. “The Gush Emunim people see Halevi as their big prophet. They study each word and they live with his ideas, the chosen people.”

In his book Arab and Jew, former New York Times correspondent David K. Shipler reports that, “As the 11- and 12-year-old boys in Kiryat Arba explained, they are learning in their yeshivas that the Arab is Amalek, the enemy tribe that God instructed the Jews to fight eternally and destroy…Hagai Segal, a settler from Ofra, was quoted in the settlers’ paper Nekuda as declaring, ‘The Torah of Israel has nothing to do with modern humanistic atheism. The Torah yearns for revenge. Such a Torah is not humanistic.’ Expressions of bellicose intolerance are given religious sanction. Some rabbis, such as Eliezer Waldenberg, winner of the 1967 Israel Prize, declared that Halakha, Jewish law, required a strict separation of Jews from Arabs, preferably an apartheid system, or better yet, the expulsion of the ‘ goyim,’ all non-Jews, from Jerusalem. An American correspondent and his family became targets of some of this chauvinism in the Jerusalem neighborhood where they lived; the word ‘goy’ was scratched into the paint of their car, and the children were hassled by Israeli youngsters on the street…Another rabbi writing in the student newspaper at Bar-Ilan University argued that the Torah prescribed genocide against the modern Amalek.”

David Weinberg, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, wrote that, “Twenty years from now, the nice ‘Israeli’ guy from chemistry class with whom your daughter falls in love could well be thoroughly Christian. It was precisely to avoid dilemmas of this kind that many of us came to Israel.”

The debate over revising the Law of Return is bringing the entire issue of the nature of the Israeli society into question. Zehava Gal-on, a member of parliament from the Meretz Party, states: “The Law of Return is discriminatory. It discriminates between Jews and non-Jews. I can accept that after the Holocaust, it was kind of a necessity. But maybe after 51 years, we are not in the same situation, and we don’t need to run our country based on such undemocratic laws.”

There are more and more voices urging that Israel be a tolerant, open society, one in which all of its citizens, of whatever religious background, are treated equally. Editorially, the Jerusalem Post criticized the bigotry being shown against non-Jewish immigrants: “It was Judaism, after all, which introduced the concept of a universal god in whose image all humanity were created with equal and infinite value. It is Jews who for centuries were victims of vicious stereotypes that were the antithesis of the universalist ideal that Judaism sought to cultivate. Now in Israel, of all places, in the name of the Jewish character of the state, of all causes, Shas’ leadership is sowing hatred of the ‘other.’”

Writing in The Jerusalem Report, (Feb. 14, 2000), Professor Ilan Pappe declares that, “’Jewish democracy’ is not only an oxymoron that fuses a religious outlook with the secular worship of individual freedom; it is an impossibility, given Israel’s history and its binational—or, for that matter, multicultural—reality….‘Jewishness’ as a state identity is not just a slogan; it is primarily an exclusionary line that denies full citizenship to non-Jews and to Jews who would not be defined as such by the Orthodox rabbinate…A political system with such a powerful exclusionary element can only be a pro forma democracy—going through the motions of democratic rule but essentially being akin to apartheid or Herrenvolk (‘master race’) democracy. The fact that this preclusive power is exercised on an indigenous minority—in addition to foreign workers and ‘heterodox’ Jews—only accentuates the absurdity of the claim that a Jewish state can be a democracy. Israel must move on to become a true liberal democracy by defining itself as a state of all its citizens.”

The debate over Israel’s identity is not going to end at any time soon. That the debate is now under way, however, is a hopeful sign. Yuli Tamir, the immigration minister, says: “I see this as a deep, profound debate going way beyond our immigration law. What will the nature of Israel be? A religious Jewish state? A state of all its citizens? A secular, democratic and Jewish state? It is a debate that will engage us for many years.”

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.