It was reported today that Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, told his ultra-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, that he would leave Netanyahu’s coalition government if two settlement outposts—Givat Assaf and Migron—were demolished. The two outposts were ordered to be destroyed by none other than the Israeli Supreme Court. At a time when Israel looks to stand firm in a region undergoing massive upheaval as well as potentially strike Iran in the wake of its burgeoning nuclear program, this move is another ploy out of the hostage-taking playbook that has bent Netanyahu to the will of the right for much of his time in office.

Should Lieberman succeed in keeping these two outposts intact, he will defy one of the last institutions bringing political balance and clarity to a country that is lurching dramatically and unchecked out of democracy. Lieberman’s back-up plan: to withdraw from the coalition if tax money that is designed to keep Palestinian security apparatuses in place is delivered to the Palestinian Authority.

Should Lieberman leave and take the government down with him, he will enfeeble a country that a time when stability is most paramount, an act which may have been his goal this whole time.

Lieberman threatens to bring down government over outposts [JTA]

Breivik is far from alone in making this transition. The English Defence League— which is praised in Breivik’s document and with which he may have been in contact—strongly supports Israel as a bastion of western civilization facing the “totalitarian threat” of Islamic fundamentalism. Israeli flags are now waved routinely at demonstrations mounted by the EDL in places of high Muslim concentration. Right-wing parties, such as the National Front in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the Austrian Freedom Party are now forming links with the governing Israeli Likud (led by premier Bibi Netanyahu) and its coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu (led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman).

As Ayoob Kara, a deputy Israeli minister for development who is actively promoting these contacts, told the Israeli daily Maariv in June, “I am looking for ways to lessen the Islamic influence in the world. I believe that is the true Nazism in this world. I am the partner of everyone who believes in the existence of this war.” His sentiments are echoed by Eliezer Cohen, a former member of the Knesset with Yisrael Beiteinu in a recent interview with Spiegel Online: “Right-wing politicians in Europe are more sensitive to the dangers facing Israel. They are talking exactly the same language as Likud and others on the Israeli right.”

I argued that a close look at these parties’ Zionism reveals a disdain for many Jews and the same DNA that led past European reactionaries to advocate the destruction of world Jewry.

Ruthven goes on to make a fascinating point concerning the fact that, if contemporary Islamophobia and earlier anti-Semitism share much, they nonetheless are not simply different variations on the same theme. And the chief difference is that today’s Muslims are poisoned by putrid Islamism from governments and communities outside of Europe who have neither Europe’s nor European Muslims’ best interests at heart. “Before the recent atrocity,” Ruthven recounts,

a group of Muslims residing in a major Norwegian city sought permission to build a mosque. They explained that the biggest part of their funding—around $3 million—would come from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. The municipal authorities—backed by the Norwegian government—turned them down.

This was not Islamophobia, but a wise decision that should be emulated throughout the West. The construction of mosques, which serve as community centers as well as places of worship, is to be welcomed when the funding comes from sources that are accountable to communities that use them. When that funding comes from the state that produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists (and whose intelligence services may even have been implicated in the attack), or from other religious sources that preach hatred or disdain for “infidels,” the authorities have every right to refuse.

The New European Far-Right [NYRB]
Related: The New Anti-Semitism [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: What to Make of the Oslo Attacker’s Zionism

The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

My first experience with the history of the Nakba came as a young Jewish Studies student at the University of Maryland. One graduate seminar I attended was led by Benny Morris, the prominent Israeli historian responsible for revolutionizing his country’s historiography pertaining to the founding period. The subject of the seminar was 1948, and the course material—army reports from the field, personal letters, radio transcripts—came directly from Morris’ influential first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, published in 1988.

Early on in the seminar, I asked Morris, a short man with a fiery personality, if it was difficult to be a post-Zionist—an adherent of a movement that strives to replace Israel’s Zionist identity with a liberal cosmopolitan one—in Israel. He responded, almost snapping at me, that he was not a post-Zionist and never had been. As I would see in the seminar, Morris had exposed one of Israel’s darkest chapters without abandoning a strong allegiance to Zionism.

The traditional Israeli 1948 narrative, which Morris challenges, starts with the Arab rejection of the U.N.-sponsored partition plan for Palestine. The plan guaranteed an Arab and a Jewish state, living in peace, after the British mandate over Palestine expired, according to that traditional narrative. Due to the Arab rejection of the plan, a violent regional war broke out in which a small number of Israeli soldiers fought thousands of Arab fighters bent on driving the Jews into the sea. Caught in the crossfires of war, the native Palestinian population voluntarily fled their homes to neighboring Arab countries. As the dust settled, the newly formed state of Israel had no choice but to refuse the return of the Palestinian refugees, given the high numbers of Jews who had been expelled from Arab countries in the course of the war.

In the late 1980s, a group of Israeli “new” historians began rewriting the foundation myths of the country. Through recently declassified Israeli and British state documents, the new historians uncovered a different version of events, which was much closer to Palestinian accounts of partial ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948. Led by Morris, a devoted archive historian, they were able to confirm that roughly 750,000 Palestinians fled from their homes, in part due to Israeli military force, small-scale massacre, episodic cases of rape, and violent intimidation. The new historians proved that Israel had planned to expel thousands of Arabs regardless of the success of the U.N. partition plan. As the 1990s dawned, Israeli society was no longer able to easily dismiss the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba as mere propaganda.

Israeli society was also slow to react to the information coming from the halls of academia. There has always been a narrative of Palestinian flight during 1948, but never one that acknowledged undertones of ethnic cleansing or active Jewish participation. Given the small size of Israeli society in 1948, it is striking that high-ranking military and intelligence officials, not to mention soldiers and kibbutz members who were responsible for expulsions, did not come forward in the 1950s and share their experiences.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli ministry of education faced a crisis when textbooks including the Palestinian narrative of 1948 were introduced for 11th- and 12th-grade students in 2009. For the first time in the history of the country, Palestinian narratives were presented alongside Israeli narratives, and the words “ethnic cleansing” appeared in high-school texts. In one section, the textbook’s authors argued that armed Jewish forces instituted a policy of ethnic cleaning, “contrary to the proclamations of peace in the Declaration of Independence.” After 61 years, the Palestinian narrative had reached Israeli high-school classrooms—but that inclusion did not last long. In 2009, the textbooks were replaced.

Despite the damaging nature of his research, Benny Morris maintained in opinion pieces and interviews that one must “break eggs to make an omelet.” He vociferously argued that ethnic cleansing was a necessary part of Israeli state building, just as the creation of the United States required the ethnic cleansing of the Native American population. In a now famous 2004 interview with Haaretz, Morris even argued that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and commander of the Israeli Defence Forces in 1948, did not go far enough in the expulsion of Palestinians from newly controlled state territory. Had Ben Gurion removed all the Palestinians, Israel would have been better off in future conflicts with the Palestinians and the Arab world, Morris said.

Not all of the new historians share Morris’ rationale for Israeli actions in 1948. Ilan Pappé, author of the 2006 work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and one of the prominent new historians, uses the Nakba to portray an overall Zionist strategy predicated on the ethnic cleansing of all the native inhabitants of historic Palestine to establish a Jewish state. Pappé is a social historian who relies on testimonies, interviews, and first-person accounts of Palestinians to construct his version of events. Unlike Morris’ pragmatism concerning the process of Israeli state building, Pappé has condemned the events of 1948, in his professional and political life, as a part in Israel’s growingly oppressive posture toward anything Arab, including Jews from Arab countries.

***

The Israeli social and political climate has not changed much since the new historians began publishing their books in the halcyon days of the Oslo peace accords. The Israeli political debate still lacks honest discussion of the Nakba and its relevance today. The Nakba debate and the groundbreaking research associated with it remain confined to small intellectual circles and the halls of academia, and even that arena is under attack. To mark the Nakba this year, Im Tirztu, an Israeli university group, published a 70-page booklet in Hebrew titled “The BS That Is the Nakba.” The pamphlet demonizes the new historians (excluding Morris, who is selectively referred to) and other Israeli academics for disseminating Arab propaganda about the country’s founding.

“There was automatic resistance when we first started publishing,” Benny Morris told me in a recent telephone interview from Oxford, where he is conducting research. “Many told me that the conflict with the Arabs is ongoing, and discussion of certain aspects of 1948 should wait until after the conflict is over and peace is here.”

Ilan Pappé told me by email from the University of Exeter, where he is a professor of Middle Eastern history: “One cannot deny that during the Oslo years (1993-2000), it was possible to air some questions about the Israeli mythology of the 1948 war. When I commenced my research I was convinced that there was a basis for a dialogue with my peers in the academia and with the public at large. But this was an illusion.” He continued, “The debate was allowed as long as it was conducted within the Zionist frame of mind; if you were able to liberate yourself from this mind-set, which I did, you were delegitimized as a partner in the debate.”

After the high-school textbook controversy broke with the Haartez coverage, education minister Gideon Saar launched an investigation that found “a great number of mistakes” in the text. The book, Nationalism: Building a State in the Middle East, was quickly edited so that the term “ethnic cleansing” and most of the Palestinian narrative disappeared. New copies lacking the controversial terms—and without any explicit mention of the Palestinian narrative of 1948—were then sent to Israeli classrooms.

In March 2011, the Knesset passed a bill that made publicly-sponsored commemoration of the Nakba a punishable crime. The bill, sponsored by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, is designed to prohibit activity “which would entail undermining the foundations of the state and contradicting its values.” In practice, the bill will allow Israel to levy fines on local- and state-funded organizations that commemorate the Nakba inside the state.

The bill has been denounced by some, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as an attack on free speech, which it clearly is, and criticized for its vague language. Israelis and Palestinians on the right and the left will continue to differ about the meaning of the Nakba and the relative validity of different versions of their national narratives. But the refusal to acknowledge documented historical realities is clearly something else. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Including the Nakba in Israeli public discourse, newspapers, and textbooks hardly means the unqualified embrace of one version of history over another. But open discussion of competing narratives with reference to the historical record is clearly a precondition for any wider kind of social and political understanding between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and between Israelis and Palestinians. Repressive attempts to criminalize narratives of the Nakba—however partial or wrong-headed its opponents may believe those narratives to be—block any possibility of mutual understanding and weaken critical discourse inside Zionist circles and within Israeli society as a whole. The most likely victim of such misguided attempts to shore up Zionism through attacks on free speech and the historical record is Zionism itself.

Joseph Dana, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, is a contributing editor to the Israeli web magazine +972. His work has appeared in The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, The National, and Haaretz.

Haaretz leads with the contradiction between the report and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s public statements, which have been adamant that Fatah, in choosing to make peace with Hamas, has chosen not to make peace with Israel. But actually, the two are not necessarily inconsistent. The report seems to acknowledge that this is what Fatah has done.

Yet instead of shutting diplomacy down, it sees Fatah’s decision as a chance, first, to “sharpen the dilemma on the Palestinian side,” and, second, to gain international respect and, more crucially, make it easier for the United States to go to bat for it as September’s U.N. General Assembly—at which the Palestinians are threatening to try for recognition of independence—approaches. “Israel must be a team player and coordinate its response to a Palestinian unity government with the administration,” the report argues, according to Haaretz (“the administration” being that of President Obama). “This will empower the United States and serve Israeli interests.” Given that the Obama administration’s most recent U.N. action related to Israel was a veto of a Security Council resolution condemning settlements, it is only logical for Israel to do what it can to strengthen the U.S. hand.

The deal is possibly very bad for Israel, the report seems to be saying, but it has happened, and the best thing Israel can do is try to shape it to its advantage—by sending a delegation to Cairo and by continuing to cooperate on security with Fatah—and, by acknowledging it (however begrudgingly), try to stave off the broader international movement that is against the Jewish state’s interests. You can wish this deal had never gone down (which it just did), and you can wish it will self-implode under the weight of its own contradictions (which remains quite possible), but, as always, wishing won’t make it so.

Palestinian Factions Sign Pact to End Rift [NYT]
Israel Foreign Ministry Views Hamas-Fatah Deal Differently Than Netanyahu [Haaretz]
Earlier: Fatah Chooses Hamas

The new law’s fine print defines treason according to sections of the Israeli criminal code that, as Haaretz’s Zvi Barel quickly noticed, include not only treason and espionage, but also far wider, and vaguer, actions: One section, for example, defines as treason “If a person commits an act liable to remove any area from the sovereignty of the State … then he is liable to the death penalty or to life imprisonment.” Section 97, alas, does not make any allowances for areas removed from Israeli sovereignty under the auspices of diplomatic negotiations—which means that Netanyahu, who ceded territory during his first term as prime minister, might want to instruct his lawyers to come up with a criminal defense for much more than the extreme corruption of which he is now accused.

In fact, there are ways around prosecution for the prime minister. But such a cloudy legal situation should worry even those who consider the new law to be commonsensical. Like other bits of political grandstanding recently orchestrated by the Israeli right—the Rotem bill, the loyalty oath, the Nakba bill, etc.—this one, too, imperils Israeli democracy by opening enormous holes without contributing anything of substance to safeguard the lives and well-being of Israelis. With a law already on the books condemning traitors to death or life imprisonment, revoking their citizenship is a laughably mild measure—unless it is seen as a future political tool against Israeli Arabs, leftists, and other undesirables.

Knesset Passes Law Revoking Citizenship for Treason [JPost]

In the south of the country, the Kipat Barzel—which translates to Iron Dome, not iron yarmulke (“kippa”)—mobile anti-missile defense system was deployed near Be’er Sheva this week, in what one right-wing blog described as a sign of an “exile mentality” that accepts enemy attack as inevitable. Hamas’ offer of a mutual cease-fire means the defense system hasn’t had a chance to see action. The army is warning that the lull won’t last for long, though, saying the deterrent force of Operation Cast Lead is on the wane.

Yoram Cohen became the Shin Bet security service’s first director to wear a skullcap, which adds another layer of meaning to Yedioth Ahronoth’s front-page headline “New Head” (Rosh Hadash). (Cohen is known as “Captain Sami” to his buddies, a nickname one radio host derided as sounding like the name of a comic book character.) Eli Gabizon, tapped to become the first Israel Prison Service chief to have risen from its ranks, was booted out of the running this week after he failed a polygraph test asking if he had received favors in exchange for arranging special treatment for certain prisoners. Yedioth punned: “Released from Jail,” (Shuhrar Mehakele, in Hebrew).

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s 2009 campaign slogan, “No loyalty, no citizenship,” was translated into law this week, when the Knesset approved a bill making it possible for those convicted of espionage or treason to lose their Israeli citizenship. The Knesset debate got so raucous that an Arab parliamentarian used the word “shiksa” to refer to fellow legislator Anastassia Michaeli, a Russian immigrant member of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party who previously converted to Judaism, which prompted another Arab speaker to plead for a translation of the Yiddish, adding: “I don’t understand Russian.” Earlier the same day, some of the more than 1,500 Israeli Arab protesters at a Land Day event in Lod had burned images of Lieberman. “It’s because he’s the most racist person in the country,” said one. “We can’t stand the sight of him.”

Yoram Arbel, perhaps Israel’s best-known sportscaster, was suspended by Channel 10 TV for 48 hours after he dedicated Saturday night’s broadcast of Israel’s Euro 2012 qualifying soccer match against Latvia to former IDF soldier Anat Kamm, who recently pleaded guilty to retaining copies of secret documents during her military service and handing them over to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau. Arbel’s suspension ended just in time for the broadcast of Tuesday night’s home match between Israel and Georgia, which ended 1-0 for Israel.

Israel sprang ahead with the end of Daylight Saving Time Thursday night, putting it seven hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time. Israelis renewed the debate over what’s known as “Summer Time” (sha’on kayitz) in Israel, as per the British terminology, pitting business and other interests against ostensibly religious ones. More daylight hours are said to yield higher manufacturing rates, longer shopping hours, and a decrease in traffic accidents, and there have been repeated calls to delay Israel’s early onset of Winter Time (sha’on horef). But Interior Minister Eli Yishai of Shas has expressed little interest in changing the law, which calls for the clocks to fall back just before Yom Kippur every year to make Israelis feel like the fast day ends an hour earlier than it would otherwise—never mind that it also starts an hour earlier. Yishai said in a statement this week that although both he and the public like Summer Time, the “social characteristics of Israel” must be taken into account. A committee is due to submit its findings on the issue in May. There’s no word yet on whether Bob Dylan, scheduled to perform in Israel’s Ramat Gan Stadium on June 20, will be singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Lieberman is considering withdrawing from the government and bringing about a general election unless his party pushes through the military conversion bill that recently passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset.

Lieberman said as much last month in a meeting with MKs from his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, at a Dead Sea hotel. The meeting was documented by journalist David Deri of Channel 10′s Saturday news magazine. The report will be broadcast this Saturday.

Oh noes! Say it ain’t so—we wouldn’t want Lieberman, the hardcore right-winger with a penchant for saying provocative things out of step with his own government’s policy, to no longer be running Israel’s Foreign Ministry!

Of course, his decision might be made easier should the attorney general decide to indict him on corruption charges, for which he has been under investigation.

Lieberman Mulls Leaving Netanyahu Government If Conversion Bill Fails [Haaretz]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]

Born in 1958 in the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernovitz, Edelstein currently serves as Israel’s first minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. The path from his non-religious communist upbringing to his current life is at once remarkable and familiar: University years studying foreign languages at the Moscow Institute for Teacher Training, a growing appreciation for his Jewish identity that compounded his desire to escape the Soviet Union, resistance followed by punishment and, finally, freedom.

For his crime of teaching Hebrew to his fellow Refuseniks, Edelstein was convicted and sent to prison in 1984 on false charges of drug dealing. Three years later, he was released on Israel Independence Day and allowed to emigrate to Israel, where he joined a population of around 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews.

Upon his arrival in Israel, Edelstein took a job as vice president of the Zionist Forum, a position he held until 1996. During that time he began his involvement in party politics by advising Benjamin Netanyahu, then in opposition. In 1996, Edelstein co-founded, with Natan Sharansky, the Yisrael ba-Aliya party. That same year, he was named minister of Immigrant Absorption, a position he held off and on until 2003, when a struggling Yisrael ba-Aliya was officially folded into Likud. In the 15th through 17th Knessets, from 1999 to 2009, Edelstein intermittently served as deputy speaker. In March 2009, the new Netanyahu government created his current portfolio.

Edelstein lives with his wife and two children in the southern West Bank settlement of Neve Daniel. With its significant number of Jews from the former Soviet Union, it is the type of community now enjoying a troubled reputation in the United States. Weeks before I spoke with Edelstein, Bill Clinton had publicly singled out settlers from the former Soviet states as a “staggering problem” for the peace process.

Edelstein addressed the question of perceived Russian Jewish extremism during a conversation last week at the Israeli Consulate near the United Nations in New York. Two press attaches and a security guard were also present.

You are the first-ever minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. Some would say the creation of the ministry was 20 years late. What took so long?

Twenty years ago, most Israelis would have said, “Take all your ideas and shove them. Who cares?” The feeling was, “There are Jews, where, in Chicago? They may either come to Israel, or give a million dollars to build a kindergarten in Sderot, OK?” That’s it. Now it’s different. When we ask the hard questions of whether the taxpayers’ money should be invested in Jewish education among the Diaspora, and connecting the Diaspora to Israel through all kinds of programs, the majority of Israelis say yes. It’s no longer seen as either-or—either they come to Israel or the hell with them.

There is a view, most recently expressed by Bill Clinton, that Jews from the former Soviet Union are all extreme in their politics.

When we are talking about a million people, you can’t perceive them as unified. They vote differently, they think differently. There are geographical differences. You can’t talk about these people as a bloc. As for [Bill Clinton’s comment], I don’t buy it. It’s common to think that Russian Jews are more hard-nosed. But I learned living in the Soviet Union that a pessimist is a well-educated optimist. I can’t blame Soviet Jews for saying, “Sign an agreement with Assad? He’s lying!”

Are you saying the experience of having lived under a totalitarian regime—

For a normal person, who’s never lived under a state based on lies, it’s difficult to imagine. I can’t blame Jews coming from the former Soviet Union for being very distrustful toward certain regimes and dictators in the area.

Is this why they show such strong support for Yisrael Beiteinu?

If you check statistically, look at the polls, Soviet Jews in Israel have never voted against the stream. They are always with the stream, sometimes with a slight shift towards the winner. In 1992 they mostly voted for Rabin and the Labor Party. In ’96 they mostly voted for Netanyahu, but so did most Israelis. In ’99, they voted for Ehud Barak and Labor, as most Israelis did. And then Ariel Sharon—the same thing. So it’s a nice legend about all Soviet Jews being very hard-nosed. But even if there’s some truth to it because of the experience I mentioned, it’s not reflected or proven in the voting habits.

How do you see the future of Russian Jewish political influence?

There are four parties in which a Russian-language constituency is represented—Kadima, Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas. This diversity is here to stay. Even if [Yisrael Beiteinu leader and current Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman decides he wants to leave politics, the political influence is here to stay. The head of the Shas faction is a Georgian who speaks Russian. There are lots of majors and colonels who in 10 years will be generals. It’s the nature of the political system in Israel. People are coming up the ranks.

How has Russian Jewish immigration impacted the Russian-Israeli strategic relationship? And what is the role of Moscow’s Jewish elite?

The contribution made to this relationship by the Russian Jewish community in the successor states of the Soviet Union was much more significant during the first years after the fall of the USSR. It used to be built on personal connections. If I needed to arrange a high-level meeting for Netanyahu in Moscow in the early ’90s, when he was in the opposition, then I called someone who called someone, and then that someone called the deputy foreign minister. That’s how things worked.

Now it’s more government-to-government. But there is still a role for the Russian Jewish community in cultivating economic and cultural ties. Community leaders like  Boris Shpigel, and some others who are also elected officials, they definitely contribute. It’s legit to be a prominent politician or businessman who is involved in Russian- or Kazakhstani-Israeli relations, maybe contribute financially to Tel Aviv University, or a Diaspora museum, or some educational program in Israel.

Do you see Russian identity weakening with the second-generation of Russian-speaking Israelis?

Logically it must be. But my friend has a Russian bookstore in Jerusalem, and he always says to me, “It’s amazing how many young people come there. It’s not that they don’t speak Hebrew, but they buy Russian books.” It’s the same thing with TV, there’s the Russian Channel 9. Everyone predicted Channel 9 would be dead in a year, and now it’s been around for six, seven years. So, ties to the old countries are not disappearing.

I think Israel is strong enough as a society to a little bit get rid of the melting-pot model. People are no less Israeli when they speak Russian to each other, or French or English. Most famous is the story of the Gesher Theater. Twenty years ago, we were trying to persuade ministers that it was a good idea for actors to come from Russia and set up a theater. They were like, “We don’t even have a Yiddish theater, and you want a Russian-language theater?” And we found the money, and before long our actors were winning Israeli Oscars. Now the plays are all in Hebrew, but the theater was a creation of Russian-speaking Jews. This is just one example of this process.

What efforts are under way to cultivate Zionist politics and Jewish identity among Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States?

Russian Jews in this country are in a totally different place. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, my meetings with Russian Jews here were a disaster. After a few meetings I stopped meeting with them. For me at the time, they were like the ultimate traitors. I was spitting and spilling blood and they were here in the United States instead of Israel. And in their eyes, I was a total jerk. We couldn’t understand each other—they thought I should be in New York, and I thought they should be in Israel. It was not a dialogue but two monologues. Now Russian Jews are in a totally different place. Sometimes when I talk to Russian Jews here I feel that I am not Zionist enough. Everyone now has relatives in Israel, and they visit, and so on.

Also, the Russian Jews who came here in the ’70s and ’80s went through a process of understanding that not only does it not hurt to be an active part of this community, but it can help. The motivation during the early years was to “become Americans.” This meant not going to Jewish schools or community events. But they realized that Americans are Jewish, Irish, Mexicans, you name it. It didn’t mean they love this country less. So, it was a process of becoming closer to Israel.

The rest is technical and tactical. There are youth programs. Birthright. Youth groups. An emissary who is working with the Russian Jewish community here.

We had a meeting last week during which the prime minister asked myself, the minister of Absorption, and [current Jewish Agency chairman] Natan Sharansky, “How many Jews do you think are still left in the former Soviet Union?” And we all looked at each other, and no one had a good answer. Some would say half a million; some would say 3 million, depending on definitions. But there’s no reliable estimate. As for Israel, we know that around 1 million Russian-speakers have come during the last two decades. We estimate that approximately the same number went all over, the main bulk being here in the United States and Canada. And, unfortunately Germany has what some say is a population close to 200,000.

Do you say “unfortunately” because of a perceived rise in anti-Semitism and far-right politics in Germany?

I am the son of Holocaust survivors, so it’s very difficult for me to understand Jews going to Germany. I say the same thing when I’m interviewed by German Jewish media. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to Jews who emigrate to Germany, or that I don’t want to see them continuing Jewish life, but emotionally it’s difficult for me to understand.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

Halevi, a kind-looking, good-humored middle-aged man with close-cropped whitish hair and a kippah, made aliyah in 1982 (he grew up in Boro Park, Brooklyn), but yesterday he sat around a table with 20 or so journalists and activists, mostly Jewish (though Irshad Manji, the prominent Muslim critic of Islam, sat opposite me), as we munched on kosher sandwiches as guests of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. I decided to schlep to the fourth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building all the way from Tablet Magazine’s offices on the fifth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building to hear what Halevi had to say, because I’ve long admired—though not always agreed with—his work in The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor.

Halevi used hand-written notes as he talked for the first 30 minutes. In between writing his book—which will follow a group of paratroopers from the Six Day War, some of whom ended up leaders in the settlement movement, some of whom ended up leaders in the peace movement—he has been grappling with an essay about the danger of what he called the “re-ghettoization” of the Jewish people. Lunch was based around his essay-in-the-making, and therefore had the welcome feel of a creative writing workshop: One person reads his story; then everyone else responds with their constructive criticism and complaints; the story itself is strengthened.

In a nutshell, Halevi’s thesis is that the right-wing agenda, which focuses on combating the international demonization of Israel, and the left-wing agenda, with its litany of grievances—settlements, the threat to democracy posed by the religious and nationalist parties—are really targeting the same fear: “That the Jews stand to be re-ghettoized.” If the Holocaust is the ultimate of ghettoization, then the state of Israel and the thriving American Jewish community—and the pact the two have made—mark a resistance to lapsing back in that direction. In turn, the far left’s attempts to de-legitimize Israel and the far right’s gambits that turn American Jews off the Jewish state mark threats to that resistance.

The Israeli right wants a loyalty oath to spite the world; the world wants to spite Israel because of the loyalty oath. And so on. Yet, curiously, the moderate right and the moderate left remain at odds. Halevi wants a re-alignment wherein the sensible, moderate forces on each side, without abandoning their substantive ideologies—he is no mushy-middle Jon Stewart or anything like that—recognize their common goals and common enemies and, together, wage a two-fronted, coordinated counter-attack against worldwide demonization and domestic right-wing alternatives, the twin tools of re-ghettoization.

Acknowledging first the legitimacy of right-wing fears, he noted: “This is a classic anti-Semitic moment. Israel has become the symbol of human rights violations, apartheid, and colonialism.” He continued: “It’s not that the U.N. Human Rights Council has singled Israel out for condemnation more than any other country. It’s that it has singled it out more than all the other countries combined.” The ultra-Orthodox—Halevi listens to their radio stations, almost as a mischievous hobby—see the international campaign of delegitimization “as confirmation of their theological despair: How it is an inviolate law of human nature that Esau, the goy, hates Jacob, the Jew.” And, he added, it’s not just the right: 55 percent of voters for the left-wing Meretz party recently said that they believe there is nothing Israel could do to alter international perceptions. The left-wing party! “I’ve never seen a statistic that shocked me more,” he said.

Therefore, as a moderate Israeli, he has little but contempt for those in America who “support those Israeli groups aligned with the demonization of Israel.” “There needs to be a red line drawn between the American Jewish community and the far left,” he added. And what is the red line? It is Judge Goldstone—whom he kept coming back to, as both symbol and touchstone, metaphor and metonym, of the international community’s unique animus toward Israel. (He noted that J Street dissociated itself from Goldstone only after significant external urging. “If J Street understood what Goldstone means to the mainstream of Israel,” he argued, “there would not have been hesitation.”)

“That’s not to let us off the hook,” he continued. Ah: Time to switch gears, to the left’s fears. I was surprised, though perhaps I should not have been, to hear him endorse President Clinton’s controversial statement regarding the illiberalness of the million Russian immigrants—“they come from a non-democratic culture,” Halevi noted. “In their minds, they’re associating democracy with the radical left.” He condemned Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s “genocidal banter”—the man who was formerly Israel’s chief rabbi recently mused that all Palestinians should go away, pretty much for good. As for settlements? Our host, Professor Steven M. Cohen, noted that in a recent essay Halevi devoted most of his word count to explaining why Israel is unlikely to abandon settlements, while mentioning, in a brief aside, that he would personally support an extension of the freeze. Halevi’s emphasis remained on the first point. Besides, he pointed out, when war with Hezbollah and who knows who else could start any day, do you really want to antagonize the religious Zionist movement whose members constitute 40 percent of the IDF’s combat-officer corps?

But Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the influential president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who sat directly across from me, would not accept Halevi’s more-in-sorrow defense of not extending the freeze. For many American Jews, Yoffie argued, it is difficult to move onto combating international demonization when that demonization is provoked by the blatant moral and practical blight that is continued West Bank construction.

Here came, for me, the most useful part of the conversation, because I got to see, in Halevi, something I had heretofore only read about: The widespread Israeli understanding of the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from all the Gaza settlements and a few in the West Bank as a complete disaster, which must never be repeated. “I don’t want Netanyahu to give anything away for free,” Halevi insisted, his voice carrying a harsh undercurrent for the only time that afternoon. The problem with extending the freeze for nothing in return, he said, is that the last time the settlements were put on hold—indeed, they were eliminated—in exchange for nothing, there were rockets; and then there was an attempt to stop the rockets; and then there was a near-total absence of international support for stopping the rockets; and then there was the Goldstone Report.

I decided to ask a question. Earlier, Halevi had set up an equivalence between the fringe Israeli right and the fringe Israeli left, in how they both are working, consciously or not, to re-ghettoize the Jewish people—the former by casting Jews as uniquely just, the latter by casting Jews as uniquely unjust. Even if that’s so, I inquired, in Israel, right now, the fringe left has barely half a voice, while the fringe right is running much of the government. Therefore, I inquired, shouldn’t American Jews focus on condemning the Israeli right fringe, if only to help bring about an equilibrium? He ceded my point about the fringe right’s outsize power in Israel—after all, when the foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman, the point is inarguable—but parried by referring back to the international community, where, he said, the fringe left is at least as strong. (My rebuttal, which I didn’t get the opportunity to make, would be that “the international community” doesn’t really matter—what matters, really, is Israel and the United States, and in those two communities, the fringe right maintains far more power than the fringe left.)

No doubt lefties familiar with Halevi cringed when I described him as moderate, but the fact is that well over an hour had passed before I heard a genuine right-wing voice, and it wasn’t Halevi. Jonathan Mark, an associate editor at The Jewish Week, had been sitting skeptically silent with an overly large tape recorder perched on the table in front him; its red light was especially big, giving the impression that every word was being captured extra clearly, the better to be thrown back at their speakers with extra velocity. Finaly, Mark spoke, comparing Shas, the premier ultra-religious Israeli party (of which Rabbi Yosef is spiritual leader), to Herschel Grynszpan, the teenage Jew who shot a German official in Paris and thereby “provoked” Kristallnacht, as Nazi propoganda had it. It is an ugly analogy—that Mark floated it confirms that, for some Jews, it will always be 1938—but one that can be engaged without being taken completely literally. Essentially, Mark was arguing that Shas’s desire to religiously regulate most facets of Israeli life, Ovadia’s “genocidal banter,” and the rest, is not why the world hates Israel, and that blaming the world’s hatred of Israel on Shas is a canard equivalent to blaming Kristallnacht on one Jew. Israel could banish Shas tomorrow, Mark was saying, and many of Israel’s enemies would continue to be Israel’s enemies.

Halevi’s response was deft: Not even addressing those irreconcilably ill-disposed to the Jewish state, he said, “I’m concerned how Rabbi Ovadia plays to our friends.” I’ll lift a kosher salmon sandwich to that.

Halevi is just one man, with idiosyncratic views. Yet I won’t consider it the height of irresponsibility to extrapolate somewhat from him to a broader Israeli consensus. Which means I’ll be waiting for that essay (which hopefully I haven’t just ruined!) Toward the end, without anyone even attempting to define his specific politics, Halevi volunteered them: “I’ve voted for every winning Israeli prime minister since 1992,” he said.

Related: Why Israel Won’t Abandon the Settlers [WSJ]

Some, such as Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz (who yesterday polemicized against the oath) and the protestors who thronged Tel Aviv’s streets this past weekend will still say any oath at all is too much. And others, including Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith, will argue the oath is unremarkable, and restricting it to non-Jews follows the established, broadly observed principle of jus sanguinis. Actually, the group that most prominently advocated the compromise that Bibi has now adopted is the Anti-Defamation League, whose director, Abraham Foxman, met with Netanyahu yesterday in Israel.

But enough of the substance—what about the politics? When Netanyahu first backed the hardline version of the oath, I (and many others) guessed it was an effort to buy credibility with the right in order to extend the settlement freeze. It’s nearly two weeks later, though, and Netanyahu was able to do no more than futilely offer an extension in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character. So: Is Bibi’s newfound willingness to make the oath more moderate a sign that bargaining with it is not worthwhile, because the extension is, officially, a lost cause?

Netanyahu Orders Change in Loyalty Oath To Include Jews [JPost]
Related: Under Oath
Earlier: What Did You Do in the Loyalty Oath War?
Bibi Floats Oath Quid for Freeze Quo

In the winter of 2009, Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned under the slogan, “Bli ne’emanut ein ezrahut”: No loyalty, no citizenship.

This week, the Israeli cabinet voted in favor of a bill that, unless the Knesset shoots it down, would require new non-Jewish citizens to pledge allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic state.” There are a few Hebrew terms for this oath: Hatzharat ne’emanut, or “declaration of loyalty,” which includes a word that, as Lieberman has discovered, has the advantage of sort of rhyming with the Hebrew word for “citizenship”; hatzharat emunim, or “declaration of allegiance”; and shvu’at emunim, which means “oath of allegiance” and is also the Hebrew title for the 2003 movie Pledge of Allegiance.

These terms have in common the Hebrew root that also appears in the word emunah, meaning belief, faith, trust, or confidence, often in a religious context. The same root is also used in a term that frequently comes up on Israel’s version of C-SPAN: Hatza’at ee-eemun, or no-confidence motion.

In Israel, a no-confidence motion passed by the Knesset can topple the government (as it once did, in 1990), but only if a majority of the total number of Knesset members votes in favor. While the goal is ostensibly to bring down the government, these motions are more often used by opposition parties to grab attention. When Israel was hit with triple-digit inflation and the outbreak of the First Intifada in the 1980s, the 11th Knesset proposed a whopping 165 no-confidence motions, not one of which brought down the government. And earlier this year, the Knesset actually passed a no-confidence measure—to no effect on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, because most of the Knesset members didn’t vote.

No-confidence motions are often overused gimmicks, and though the government faced several when the Knesset’s winter session opened this week, there was nary a mention of them. Similarly, the loyalty oath won’t actually affect that many people, since the vast majority of new immigrants are considered Jewish under Israel’s Law of Return and would therefore be exempt from taking it.

And likewise, the proposed hatzharat ne’emanut is partly symbolic, and the latest way for politicians to show that they’re bigger Zionists than the next guy.

But the loyalty oath debate reverberates far beyond the Knesset plenum. Intentionally or not, the cabinet’s endorsement of the oath bellows to Israel’s Arab citizens, and to the world, that Israel sees religion as a core component of its citizens’ status and is confident that reciting the proper words constitutes a value in its own right—a position that, even for some of Israel’s most loyal citizens, may require too large a leap of emunah.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: ‘After the Holidays’

And lo! No more than a couple hours passed before an anonymous Labor minister told Haaretz, “I hope that Netanyahu’s support is a payoff to Lieberman, so that the prime minister will be able to extend the freeze without breaking apart his coalition.” Concisely put.

The loyalty oath bill, likely to become law Sunday, would require all those assuming Israeli citizenship to swear allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”—a thumb directly in the eyes of the 20 percent of the Israeli population that is Arab. If you are in favor of extending the construction freeze in order to keep talks going, you must reckon with the fact that this oath is what you are paying at the register.

Another way the loyalty oath maneuver functions is as a message to the Arab League, which Friday will vote on (and likely back) President Abbas’s decision to suspend talks without a freeze extension. Netanyahu has apparently been seeking cabinet approval for the extension, and is having great trouble; in addition to being the quid for the extension quo, this gambit assures the Arab League (and, again, the Americans) that Bibi is making an honest effort.

One problem with the fact that both Bibi and the Americans are throwing so much at resolving this intermediate settlement issue—in addition to the fact that it is merely intermediate—is that it is not at all clear that settlements are the main obstacle to peace. (Which is not to minimize their historic role in the conflict, nor Israeli culpability for them.) As experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller argued last weekend, “even if the settlement issue were resolved today, negotiations would still confront another galactic challenge: a crisis within the Palestinian national movement, with two authorities governing two discreet areas with two different security services, two different patrons and two different visions of the Palestinian future.” Or as another experienced hand, David Makovsky, noted, “It would be a bitter irony if a final peace resolution and the demarcation of a two-state solution were derailed due to problems with managing the lesser issue of the moment.”

One imagines the t-shirt the satirist will draw Bibi as wearing: “I tried to keep talks going another two months, and all I got was this loyalty oath.” This lousy loyalty oath.

Victory for Israel’s Right as ‘Jewish state’ Loyalty Oath Nears Vote [Haaretz]
Labor Expects New Settlement Freeze as Payoff for Loyalty Oath [Haaretz]
PM Testing Waters in Cabinet on Freeze Extension [JPost]
Related: Five Myths About Middle East Peace [WP]
Dear Prime Minister: U.S. Efforts To Keep the Peace Process on Track [Washington Institute for Near East Policy]
Editor’s Notes: Caught by a Red Herring [JPost]

This morning, Ayalon, speaking before yet a third group of American Jewish leaders (as well as reporters, including this one), excused himself by saying the episode revealed a “cultural” gulf between the Israelis and the Palestinians that transcends the more obvious, and immediate, stumbling block to the fledgling peace negotiations—namely, this Sunday’s expiration of the ten-month-long moratorium on new construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “I didn’t say ‘two states for two peoples, Jews and Palestinians,’” Ayalon explained. “But if they don’t have the decency to talk about two states for two peoples, then there is a major problem here.”

Well. Since Ayalon proceeded to repeat almost word-for-word the formulation Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains in Jerusalem, used last weekend to call on Abbas to recognize the Jewish state—that he needs to say it not in English or in Hebrew but in Arabic, “to his own people in their own language”—we can probably assume that there’s a concerted strategy to introduce the notion that, if the talks do collapse, it’s not just because of Israeli intransigence on the settlement issue.

But here is where the chickens of this summer’s heated debate over Israel’s proposed new conversion bill have come home to roost: It’s difficult to tell non-Orthodox American Jews that they should back an Israeli negotiating position predicated on drawing a clear line between Jews and everyone else when their own Jewishness has recently been viciously called into question by Israeli leaders, including those of Ayalon’s own Yisrael Beiteinu Party, and Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar.

So almost as the words came out of his mouth, Ayalon—who was standing squarely opposite Rabbi Julie Schoenfeld, head of the Conservative movement, sitting with her arms crossed—seemed to realize this inevitable rebuttal. Hands shot up, with their owners eager to press the question, “A Jewish state … for whom?” “Well,” said Ayalon, a former ambassador to the U.S. and a reasonably agile politician, “Israel is not just for Israelis, it’s for the Jewish people.” He tried to extend an olive branch, saying his party would gladly solicit ideas from Reform and Conservative leaders. But he stumbled over Schoenfeld’s name, calling her Rabbi Schoenberg instead. She didn’t reply, but simply nodded and gave a Cheshire cat-like smile.

All of which raises the question: Why? Part of the answer may lie in Peter Beinart’s recent New York Review of Books essay, which called for the need “to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth.” What Beinart, like others, has failed to take into account is that the various illiberal trends that he deplores do not signal the erosion of Israeli democracy, but the exact opposite.

While it’s true that liberal societies have traditionally evolved into democratic ones (and vice versa), it’s still worth remembering that liberalism has comfortably existed in the absence of substantial democracy (think of Britain and the United States prior to the expansion of suffrage in the 1830s or of classical Athenian democracy that lacked a liberal creed). Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland sketches a blueprint for a future Jewish state that is remarkably indicative of this asymmetric relationship. Despite imagining a liberal society where “everyone is free and may do as he chooses” and that abides by the motto “Man, though art my brother,” Herzl conspicuously disregards the possibility of popular democracy. In The Jewish State, he even goes so far as to suggest an “aristocratic republic.” The actual founder of the Jewish state and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, seems to have followed suit. Although a fervent supporter of universal human rights and of granting “full and equal citizenship” to all the state’s inhabitants regardless of their religion, race, or sex—a right Israel’s declaration of independence enshrines—Ben-Gurion was far less democratic than liberal.

Ben-Gurion’s perception of democracy was as elitist as they come: Not only did he infamously describe the Israeli immigrant classes as “human dust,” but he once declared, “I don’t know what the people want, I know what they need.” The late Israeli historian Amos Elon appropriately compared Ben-Gurion and his fellow founding fathers to a “mandarin class” that ruled Israel like “feudal principalities.”

The watershed moment—the revolution, if you will—when the “old regime” was dethroned took place with Labor’s first-ever national electoral defeat at the hands of Likud in 1977. It is at this historical locus that we can begin to trace the contemporary decline of Israeli liberalism at the hands of democratic forces, which suddenly discovered an unprecedented opportunity to escape the periphery of national politics and taste the previously forbidden fruits of power.

The first example is that of the conservative Shas party. What began in the 1980s as a political association of North African and Middle Eastern ultra-Orthodox Jews has since burgeoned into a highly influential kingmaker of Israeli politics. Unfortunately, while Shas has nobly fought on behalf of underprivileged and historically discriminated lower classes and ethnic groups, it has also waged a commensurately stubborn battle against secular liberalism. That the spiritual leader of Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has compared Arabs to “snakes” and called for their “annihilation,” while party chairman and Interior Minister Eli Yishai often likens homosexuals to “sick people,” is a sobering reminder that the price of democracy may be paid for in the coin of liberal ideals.

Next there are the settlers. Jewish messianism has always played a prominent role in the Zionist enterprise. However, the conquest of the West Bank in 1967 facilitated the rise of millennialist social and political movements such as Gush Emunim, Tehiya, National Union, and Mafdal, which reinvented itself as a rightist party in the 1980s. Together, their entire raison d’être rested in their commitment to preserve “eretz yisrael hashlema,” or a “greater” Israel. By consistently holding between 10 and 15 seats in the Knesset over the past three decades, not only did these parties solidify a vocal rightist block that remained a formidable impediment to any land-for-peace negotiations, but, more detrimental, they also sprouted militant offshoots that advocated forceful Arab-population removals and violence. It’s worth remembering that the virulent incitement propagated by members of these democratically empowered forces fueled the delegitimizing of the peace process and tragically culminated in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Yet another example is that of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi parties. On the eve of Israel’s founding in 1947, many of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, leaders in then-Palestine were hesitant to endorse the fledgling Jewish state and only came on board after Ben-Gurion assured them in the famous “status quo” agreement that their prerogative in all religious affairs would be maintained. Needless to say, the Haredi leaders got the hang of democratic politics in no time. In the bifurcated Israeli parliamentary system, in which tenuous coalition governments often hang on to power with a handful of seats, the Haredi parties have in recent decades repeatedly supplied this electoral lifeline—but at a cost: Their religious institutions maintain a monopoly on marriage laws, among other things, and enforce a rigid criteria that prevents the state from authorizing marriages between Jews and those deemed “not sufficiently Jewish,” which especially affects Jews who undergo a non-Orthodox conversion. As a result, any Israeli seeking to enter into a secular civil marriage—a staple of modern liberal society—can only do so outside of Israel.

Finally, the fourth and most recent threat to the sustenance of Israeli liberalism is that reflected by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Russian-immigrant-dominated party, Yisrael Beiteinu. If there ever was a collective failure to assimilate, it is this: Two decades after the influx of a million Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union, the once-boiling Israeli melting pot had evidently lost steam. The same party that offers Russian immigrants a much needed political voice is also founded upon profoundly racist and nationalistic ideals, including tying citizenship to loyalty and conditioning Arab citizenship on service to the state. Not only is such a suggestion vehemently discriminatory, but it essentially seeks to revoke the axiomatic understanding that citizenship is a right, not a privilege—an understanding upon which the postwar concept of human rights is founded.

The implications that arise from this apparent consolidation of Israeli democracy at the expense of its liberal ethos are as complex as they are depressing. That a majority of Israelis still remain staunchly liberal and democratic does not contradict the fact that diverse and powerful illiberal forces are gradually—and democratically—tipping the balance of this delicate equilibrium. One thing that therefore must be said about the current Jerusalem government is that Netanyahu and his cabinet are actually fulfilling their part of the social contract and representing remarkably well the public will. It is in light of this sociopolitical process that it’s no longer plausible to convince ourselves that what we are witnessing is yet another chapter in the historical March of Folly, in which a reckless leadership leads the people astray—if only because the Israeli people themselves are holding the compass.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for the Israeli daily Maariv.

If this bill passes, future historians will inevitably wonder why, at a critical moment in its history, Israel chose to tell 85 percent of the Jewish diaspora that their rabbis weren’t rabbis and their religious practices were a sham, the conversions of their parents and spouses were invalid, their marriages weren’t legal under Jewish law, and their progeny were a tribe of bastards unfit to marry other Jews.

It’s a sad state of affairs, one this magazine has been covering for at least half of its existence—beginning with a story that Alana alludes to when she mentions “an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion [who] resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.” She’s referring to Leib Tropper, whose power, corruption, and lies we investigated last January (and which, frankly, we’ve been mystified about the non-reaction to):

-Allison Hoffman’s profile;

-Marissa Brostoff on one woman’s side of the story;

-Hoffman on the wealthy, possibly crazy heir who bankrolled Tropper;

-Hoffman on how other Haredi rabbis have been reluctant to condemn him;

-Oh, and you can listen to the tapes.

Below, a helpful cheat sheet for Alana’s essay:

• “Even if you are Orthodox—and especially if you are modern Orthodox—your rabbi likely doesn’t make the cut,” Alana writes. “(Don’t believe it? Go ask him.)” An under-covered aspect of this bill is the extent to which, again to use Alana’s words, “the criteria used by the rabbinate are driven by internal Haredi politics, not observance.” Which makes it all the more odd that while the Reform and Conservative movements have spoken out strongly against the bill, as have a host of other American Jewish organizations, Orthodox organizations such as the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel have been silent.

• The philosophy behind the bill, according to Alana, “is well outside the consensus established by Hillel—arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked.” The book in question is Hillel: If Not Now, When?, coming in September from Nextbook Press.

• Your final cheat sheet item? This bill is probably not a good idea.

The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]
Conversion Bill Dismays U.S. Senators [JPost]
Related: Hillel: If Not Now, When? [Nextbook Press]

Bibi’s double books exploded this week with revelations of a secret meeting (for “secret,” read “behind Lieberman’s back”) between Turkey’s foreign minister and Israel’s industry minister in Zurich over the flotilla fallout. So the Turkish foreign minister met not with his Israeli counterpart, as diplomatic protocol would have it, but with Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer—a member of, yup, Barak’s Labor Party.

Lieberman was reportedly furious (from his perspective, he has every right to be); reportedly refused to take Netanyahu’s calls initially and plotted revenge; and eventually met with Netanyahu and got the prime minister to admit that the whole thing was a big mistake. Lieberman says he won’t leave the government over it. Phew?

The continuing problem is that it was not necessarily a mistake. Though a student of international relations, Lieberman has minimal diplomatic experience in absolute terms; compared to Barak, the former prime minister who has developed relationships with top officials all over the world (and nowhere more than in the United States), Lieberman may as well possess as much diplomatic experience as you or I. Additionally, Lieberman’s view of the world is a bit … cruder than Barak’s—or even the more right-wing Netanyahu’s. An Israel whose de facto top diplomat is Avigdor Lieberman is almost certainly a yet more isolated Israel.

And yet, and yet! Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reaction to the secret meeting? Unchanged demands: Until Israel apologizes, agrees to an international probe, lifts the Gaza blockade, and pays compensation, Turkey says, it will not appoint a new ambassador. Maybe Lieberman is onto something? But if he is the most sane one, we’re all in trouble.

Turkish and Israeli Officials Meet Secretly on Raid Crisis [NYT]
Lieberman Demands Netanyahu Backing in Face of Global Backlash [Haaretz]
FM To Take ‘Calculated’ Revenge on PM [JPost]
PM to FM: ‘It Was A Mistake’ [JPost]
Earlier: Israel’s Top Diplomat
Lieberman Nixes Palestinian State in ’12

When Lieberman traveled stateside earlier this month, he stayed in New York, mostly buttering up the Russian Jewish community (as Allison Hoffman reported). Barak headed to Washington, D.C., and met with top officials.

Adds Guttman:

Washington’s warm embrace of Israel’s defense minister stands in stark contrast to the public display of chill that came out of the White House during Netanyahu’s last two visits, which were both scheduled in the evening, without photo-ops or press availabilities. Then, there is the almost nonexistent contact that administration officials have had with Lieberman, Israel’s actual foreign minister.

But it is not just U.S. difficulties with these two officials that puts Barak in his current role. According to David Makovsky, director of the project on the Middle East peace process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Obama administration is actively attracted to work with Barak in particular, because he is seen as someone who “understands that time is not on Israel’s side” when it comes to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Israel’s Stealth F.M.: Barak, Not Lieberman, Tasked With Weighty Issues [Forward]
Earlier: Lieberman Nixes Palestinian State in ’12
Lieberman, in New York, Meets With Russian Jews

The other context in which to understand Lieberman’s comments is Israel’s complicated coalition politics. Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu want to pull the government led by Likud Prime Minister Netanyahu further away from too much territorial (or, really, any kind) of reconciliation with the Palestinians, even as opposition leader Tzipi Livni flirts with trying to replace Lieberman’s right-wing party with her centrist Kadima. It is rumored that Livni—whose party, let’s not forget, actually won the most votes in last year’s elections—would be willing to enter the coalition on the condition of replacing Lieberman at the Foreign Ministry. Yet Livni also just yesterday took aim at Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (of the Labor Party) for leading the country “from crisis to crisis.” She may or may not want to enter this coalition; but as she made clear this weekend, she very much wants to lead the next one.

As for Yisrael Beiteinu, Foreign Ministry bureaucrats are dragging their feet in arranging for Netanyahu’s planned July 6 visit to the White House, ostensibly as part of a partial strike for better wages. And today, Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau—another hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu member, who was last seen saber-rattling with Lebanon—compared Barak to a “battered wife,” who, “instead of standing up to the person who is beating her tries again and again to see what more she can give up on,” which, in Landau’s extremely tasteful metaphor, represents Barak’s preferred policy of continued territorial withdrawals.

So, Lieberman’s comments today? They are designed to provoke the Palestinians, sure. But they may also be designed to force Netanyahu to take a stand, against Livni and against the more centrist negotiating policy favored by his coalition-mate Barak, at the risk of losing his right flank.

Oh, and hey, you know what none of this stuff really applies to? Gaza, and its 1.5 million residents.

Israel Rules Out Palestinian State By 2012 [NYT]
Lieberman and Netanyahu in Spat [JPost]
Related: The Pragmatist [Tablet Magazine]

Three fields, and particularly the “Leviathan” site discovered earlier this month, are estimated to be able to turn Israel into a net energy exporter.

Yesterday, Tablet Magazine columnist Lee Smith predicted that Israel’s newfound energy resources could be the spark that lights what many consider to be an inevitable second round of the 2006 Lebanon war. A member of Hezbollah’s executive council told Smith, “If Lebanon needed to pile up hundreds, thousands of rockets to protect our sovereignty, dignity, and hydraulic resources, then the need to protect our hydrocarbon assets motivates us to enhance the Resistance’s capacities.” Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a Hezbollah ally, added to Smith, “The arms of the Resistance are crucial for defending Lebanon’s offshore petroleum resources.”

For years, according to Smith, Hezbollah has justified its armed presence with reference to the Shebaa Farms, “an insignificant piece of land in the Golan Heights.” “The natural gas fields,” Smith notes, “are Shebaa on steroids.”

Landau: We Will Defend Gas Field [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War

• Several American Jewish religious leaders called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to withdraw the Yisrael Beiteinu-sponsored conversion bill. They warn that it would concentrate power over who qualifies for the Law of Return with the Chief Rabbinate. [JTA]

• Apparently, someone wants to do for Jews on Long Island what Jersey Shore has done for Italian-Americans in New Jersey. [Crushable]

• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to release kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [Ynet]

• The late DJ AM, born Adam Goldstein, has a crucial cameo in the box office-smashing Iron Man 2. [LAT]

• An extensive interview with novelist Nathan Englander, in part touching on his story in this week’s New Yorker. [Book Bench]

Netanyahu accused Iran of trying to get Israel and Syria to start firing things at each other. President Ahmadinejad?

• WINNER: Turkey. Yes, the Arab and Muslim worlds have a new cause célèbre. But even the broader international community perceives Turkey as the victim of tactless, condescending treatment that violated the extensive decorum governing diplomatic relations. Just as importantly, the world has basically forgotten what originally started all this: a Turkish TV series that depicted Mossad agents as bloodthirsty murderers, as well as extremely questionable comments about Israel from Turkey’s leaders.

• LOSER: Israel. Its unjustified actions are noted and condemned, while its justified grievances are ignored—and unlike when that usually happens, Israel can largely blame itself. Plus, Turkey now has cover to do what it was going to do anyway: cozy up to its neighbors to the east, Syria and Iran.

• WINNER: Shimon Peres. Blessed is the peacemaker! A Turkish diplomat credited Israel’s 86-year-old president with arranging the apology that resolved the burgeoning crisis: “You’re lucky you have Peres, the wise man of the Middle East,” he said. Peres’s legacy as the last rise-above-the-fray old-line Zionist probably did not need further buffing, but in case it did, his role in this affair should do the trick.

• LOSER: Danny Ayalon. The deputy foreign minister, a former ambassador to the United States, is an ambitious politician who might have been looking to make a name for himself while Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—his boss and the leader of his right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party—is under police investigation. Instead, Ayalon is now being roundly condemned, with Yisrael Beiteinu members asserting that his career is over and even Peres throwing him under the bus.

• WINNER: Benjamin Netanyahu. Though the prime minister hasn’t been caught on-record saying so, various hints suggest that he at least tacitly supported Ayalon’s actions. Yet Ayalon, and to some extent Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu, took the blame, while Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party look like moderates by comparison.

• WINNER AND LOSER: The United States. When Israel’s image in the Arab and Muslim world suffers, so does America’s. Additionally, it is massively in the U.S. interest for Israel and Turkey, two important strategic U.S. allies, to have a strong relationship, and this latest affair won’t help what was already a deteriorating partnership. On the other hand, this affair frankly could have gotten a whole lot worse before it got better. Yet another country owes Peres its thanks.

Israel and Turkey Patch Up Rift Over a Diplomatic Slight [NYT]
Turkish Official: Israel’s Lucky To Have Peres [Ynet]
‘Ayalon’s Political Career Is Ruined’ [JPost]
Don’t Blame Israel For Ayalon’s Error [JPost]

Earlier: Trouble With Turkey

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.”