The Israeli Return Act, which excludes Jews, stifles democracy and reinforces a very theocratic and discriminatory view of citizenship. American Jews must oppose it.
Imagine that you are one of the approximately 9% of the English-speaking and Protestant population or one of the 100,000 Jews living in and around Montreal. When the government was formed, you became a citizen but enjoyed the few privileges that Catholics have. Or imagine that you are a Greek Orthodox immigrant and would like to become a citizen. Either way, you must decide to convert to Catholicism for your own advancement.
Surely, a democratic Jewish state should now have an amended immigration law, but in Israel all immigrants need to go through a five-year process of naturalizing Hebrew culture, and then the reward is “Israeli” citizenship.
Surely a Jewish and democratic state should by now have a reformed immigration law – one that might well give preference to refugees from antisemitism, but would require all immigrants to undergo, say, a five-year process of naturalization to Hebrew culture and then award the citizenship status of “Israeli”?
If the Knesset overturns the court’s ruling to slightly expand the circle of “legitimate” Jews who qualify for citizenship – which could be considered imposing the ostensible will of the majority – should this power play really be democratic activists’ critical, pressing problem, or the more foundational, but uncomfortable, criteria of Jewishness itself?
All streams of Jewish religious tradition would thrive as voluntary communities and congregations in a secular Israel, quite like Feldman’s own Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where separation of religion and state is taken for granted, yet religious streams seem to be doing just fine.
The lives of individual immigrants may be ameliorated by the recent court decision, which is a relief. But rabbinic equality, even if this were less perfunctory, should not be confused with democratic advance.
Israeli democrats, Jews and Arabs, don’t need a Reform or Conservative version of conversion, much as that flatters American Jews. They need an anachronistic immigration law to be repealed, and a secular version of Israeli citizenship protected by a Bill of Rights. And they need American Jewish constitutional scholars, of all people, to have their back.