• Lebanon’s more complicated, diffuse upheaval. [NYT]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is taking notification that he will likely be indicted in strive. If it happens, it won’t happen for several months. [NYT]

• David Ignatius looks at three important leaders in the new Egypt: Amr Moussa; Mohammed ElBaradei; and mega-businessman Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian. [WP]

• Acting on a U.S. extradition request, Israelis arrested an official from the scandal-tainted Iowa Agriprocessors kosher meat plant. [AP/NYT]

• For the first time, two non-Jews entered into a civil union in Israel. [JTA]

Starting next week, non-Jewish or -affiliated same-sex couples will be able to enter into civil unions. The bill’s sponsor wants to extend the law to all Israelis, including Jews; incredibly, the sponsor is none other than Yisrael Beiteinu MK David Rotem, notorious for sponsoring the heinous conversion bill. Even a blind squirrel catches an occasional nut, eh?

On top of that, an Israeli Health Ministry committee has made a new recommendation concerning medicinal marijuana. Not that it should be legalized—it already is legalized, natch—but that the country’s universal health care should pay for it.

And on the social front, two Israeli women became the first same-sex duo to compete together in a version of Dancing With The Stars. The “star” in this case was sportscaster Gili Shem Tov, a sportscaster who did the cha-cha. Shem Tov, a lesbian, said “it felt natural.” (Oh, and to answer your next question: They take turns leading.)

Knesset Committee Paves Way for Civil Unions [JTA]
Government May Cover Cost of Medicinal Marijuana [Haaretz]
Israel: New Step for Dance Contest [NYT]

An op-ed in Ynet is a bit more optimistic, arguing that the bill is a step in the right direction though one that, because it only refers to those who can prove they are “without religion,” only applies to a small percentage of people who wish to wed in Israel. “Before the union is confirmed, the registrar will have to publish the details of the request and each religious court will have the opportunity to examine whether either member of the couple belongs to its community,” the op-ed points out, quoting another commentator. “If there is a dispute over the matter, the religious court will make the final decision…. So, does this mean that the Rabbinical Courts are now (also) determining ‘Who is NOT a Jew’?”

Civil Union Bill ‘Indecent Proposal’ [Hiddush]
An Important First Step [Ynet]
Previously: The Other Civil Union

The trouble seems to have been how the boy’s mother became a Jew—she used what Haaretz calls an “independent progressive synagogue”—which led Britain’s Office of the Chief Rabbi, which decides on the legitimacy of such conversions, to reject her claim to Jewishness. In their ruling, the three judges wrote: “The motive for discrimination, whether benign or malign, theological or supremacist, makes it no less and no more unlawful,” a decision that reflects the broadest state intervention into the affairs of British Jews since Oliver Cromwell allowed them back into the country.

Interestingly, this sets a international precedent for something Israel is trying to accomplish: the introduction of civil unions as an alternative to the Orthodox-approved religious kind (currently the only legal way to go for Jews there). A bill to do that was recently outvoted in the Knesset when Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party absented itself from the vote, claiming the measure—sponsored by a swath of Labor and Kadima Knesset members—was designed merely to humiliate the party by forcing a wedge between it and its conservative religious allies. Yisrael Beiteinu candidates had campaigned in the last Israeli election as very much in favor of allowing civil marriage, a move popular with one of its largest voting blocs, Russian immigrants who, having grown up in the Soviet Union, are often deemed insufficiently Jewish by the Israeli rabbinate. But Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu’s ally, is against civil marriages.

Who Is a Jew? Let the Civil Court Decide ] [Haaretz]
Related: The Other Civil Union [Tablet]

Early in June, a bill that would have authorized civil unions, cosponsored by a host of Kadima and Labor representatives, was defeated in the Knesset due largely to a turnabout by Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu. The party—whose largest voting bloc is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their first-generation children, many of whom the rabbinate does not consider halachically Jewish—had campaigned in this year’s national election on the promise of delivering a civil union bill. But, once in power, Lieberman changed his position to dovetail with that of the Orthodox and Haredi parties—including Shas, Agudat Yisrael and Bayit Yehudi—that make up Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government. (Calls and emails to the Yisrael Beiteinu Jerusalem headquarters went unanswered.)

Israel may be a modern democracy, but its marriage laws are moored to 19th-century empire—Ottoman, to be exact. The decision to grant the Israeli rabbinate complete control over Jewish matrimony derives from the Turkish millet system in which each confessional community—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—was unilaterally in charge of its own population’s marriage laws. This system was kept in place under British Mandate Palestine, which, operating under the assumption that monotheistic groups are best left to govern themselves, refused to recognize marriages conducted outside of these communities (excluding consular marriages for colonial officials, and civil divorces obtained in other countries).

Once Israel was founded, the law swung between insularity and inclusiveness. After the founding of the state, David Ben-Gurion, who did not want to alienate religious Jews eager to make aliyah, entered into the so-called status quo agreement, whereby confessional communities would continue to oversee the process of marriage registration. Membership in the Jewish community was determined by the “Knesset Israel” courts until 1953, when rabbinical courts assumed full jurisdiction over this and other arcane questions of Jewishness. The rabbis hewed to an Orthodox interpretation of halacha—according to which one needs to have been born to a Jewish mother or to have undergone an accepted Orthodox conversion—in deciding who is and is not “Jewish,” and thus fit for Israeli matrimony. Two Supreme Court cases liberalized the nuptial code somewhat: in 1951, the Court decided that marriages that took place outside of Israel and were conducted by a rabbinical court—with proven halachic legitimacy—should be recognized. And in 1961, it ruled that the Ministry of the Interior must register married couples who were joined in civil unions outside of Israel, regardless of whether one or both of the partners were Israeli citizens.

Unmarried cohabitating couples are granted certain tax, insurance, and inheritance benefits under the Israeli version of common-law marriage—known as rishum hazugiyut—but their unions, and the families that derive from them, are not formally recognized by the state. (In 2007, the Olmert government even passed a law that created a separate category of gentiles; these indisputable non-Jews were now allowed to marry each other in Israel, provided they didn’t try to marry Jews.) As a result, atheists, secular Jews, Reform Jews, and Jews who refuse to undergo Orthodox conversion rituals must travel outside Israel to a civil ceremony that will then be recognized by the Israeli government. Cyprus is the most popular destination given the proximity and lower cost of the proceedings.

Even Jews may be forbidden from marrying other Jews with higher pedigrees, if the rabbinate so decrees. Consider the case of Irina Plotkinov, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, who in 2005 was deemed Jewish by the same rabbinical court that also said she could not lawfully marry the man she fell in love with: native Israeli Shmuel Cohen. While the court determined Plotkinov was indeed Jewish and single, it prohibited her from marrying a kohen, or a man considered by Jewish custom to be a descendant of Aaron and the priests of the First Temple.

Some American converts to Orthodox Judaism have trouble navigating the caprices of the Israeli rabbinate, too. Avraham Elhiany, the son of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, underwent an Orthodox conversion in Metairie, Louisiana. He then met and fell for an Israeli woman and scheduled a lavish wedding ceremony in her hometown of Ma’alot. But when the pair presented themselves to the town’s rabbi, they were told that his conversion was not legitimate. According to San Francisco’s J Weekly, which first reported the story, the rabbi’s complaint was that Elhiany’s conversion certificate was handwritten instead of typed (and never mind that a typewriter with Hebrew typesetting was unavailable in Metairie); that it was also signed by three rabbis in the town’s Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel meant little in terms of state recognition.

Adding to the confusion are countervailing definitions of what it means to be “Jewish” under Israeli  citizenship laws. In 1970, Prime Minister Golda Meir and her Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira acceded to mounting Orthodox pressures to stipulate that while the Israeli Law of Return would still apply to a person who only had one Jewish parent or grandparent, and to that person’s spouse, the civil definition of a Jew would be narrowly defined as “someone who was born to a Jewish mother, or who converted and is not a member of another religion.” This created a kind of limbo realm within the greater Zionist project: technically speaking, a Diaspora Jew may make aliyah and live the rest of his life as a full citizen in Israel, but not be able to obtain a marriage license.

According to Rabbi Seth Farber, head of the Jerusalem-based Jewish-Life Information Center, which helps recent and would-be converts navigate the country’s conversion laws, this seeming contradiction is actually rooted in the fact that the Jewish state was founded not just as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, but as a check on assimilation. “In the infancy of the state, the marriage issue never really came up,” Farber says. “Pretty much everybody identified with the Jewish religious community. But in an era in which the rabbinate refuses to certify plenty of well-meaning and observant Jews as eligible for marriage, it ought to take the lead in creating a civil alternative for people.” The rabbinate, Farber explains, understands that it has a mounting social problem on its hands but worries that by lowering its criteria, it will inch ever closer to the legitimization of intermarriage in Israel. Nevertheless, Farber argues, “the threshold for proving one’s Jewishness in this country will come down the moment there is a civil marriage alternative. The rabbinate will want to stay relevant, and it’ll have to adapt.” Changing internal demographics might accelerate that adaptation. If Arab Israelis outnumber Jewish Israelis in the coming decades, as forecasts suggests they will, then the state should want to do everything it can to encourage sanctioned marriages, even at the expense of defining down eligibility—and Jewishness.

To get a sense of how at odds Israel is with itself on this question, one need only look at one of the lesser-studied clauses of Netanyahu’s coalition government agreement. As reported by Rabbi Farber in a Hebrew-language article for Haaretz, the current administration mandates that any future civil union bill that is passed will still grant full authority to the Chief Rabbinate to determine who is not Jewish enough for a religious marriage and therefore eligible for a civil union. In this Kafkaesque scenario, a person turned away by a rabbi for not being Jewish enough may then be turned away again for not being able to prove it.

“You’re not going to get the Haredim to say, yes, civil marriage is okay,” says Shmarya Rosenberg, the proprietor of the Failed Messiah blog, which monitors the American and Israeli Orthodox community. He adds that the entire Israeli electoral system—the entire nation votes as a whole for a party list, not as constituents from separate districts for individual candidates—would have to be overhauled in order to reduce the power of the Orthodox parties and their mainstream allies, like Netanyahu’s Likud.

So will things change? While these conditions are no doubt unpleasant for people who can’t legally say “I do,” yet may not be able to afford overseas nuptials, they are not dire yet enough warrant substantive reform. “If you’re Jewish and you were married five years ago, you have not confronted the problem that exists today,” Rosenberg says. “The problem is much worse for anyone who isn’t Orthodox. As the Haredi strength grows and their control grows, that’ll become clearer.” Rosenberg adds that because an influential party like Shas is founded as much on Sephardic pride as it is on Orthodox religiosity, there’s an added ethnic component to this debate, which complicates it further. “Lots of non-religious voters vote for Shas, and while they may be for civil unions in theory, there’s enormous social pressure to practically oppose civil unions in opinion polls and at the ballot box.”