On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Nathan Newman wrote:
> Eligibility for citizenship is based on religion and anyone who
> converts to Judaism can become a citizen.
Nathan, please. Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity cannot be separated under Israeli or Halakic law. Yes, it's true, you could start a Jewish bloodline if someone converted. But you could start a German bloodline if someone got naturalized. And an orthodox conversion is dauntingly difficult. A misnamed marriage of convenience -- which is available in some form from every country in the world -- is way easier. So you can't use that as an index of openness. (Reform conversion is easy, but no one does it that way, because it's only on tap in America, and the number of American reform Jews that ask for Israeli citizenship is negligible. Besides (a) you still couldn't get married or buried or lots of other things and (b) reform conversion is considered a loophole, not the essence of the law, by even its stoutest Israeli defenders -- they defend it as a loophole (and as a purely symbolic one, since no one uses it) by saying the law needs more such, as an organic way to become non-ethnic.)
The openness of present day immigration -- the huge influx of non-practicing Russians, for example -- is based precisely on the ethnic definition of Judaism. If it were restricted to a religious definition -- a cause to which Shas has dedicated itself -- immigration would become much more restrictive, because the religious definition would be orthodox.
There has been a running debate in Israel for the last couple of years about whether Israel should finally get a modern immigration law with at least some element of ius soli. The present political configuration doesn't favor it, but it's still a huge advance ideologically that people can have such debates seriously in the pages of Haaretz. On the other hand, the language used by the anti-immigration forces is absolutely hateful, as bad as you'll find anywhere -- we should keep them in camps, they are polluting our women, the whole nine yards. And those are the Lithuanians they're talking about.
Lastly, it is true that present day Israel is a remarkable ethnic mix, just measured visually by a walk down the street. But that's just evidence that the one-parent rule legally allows an awful lot of intermarrying with the locals over 5000 years. Legally, Israeli citizenship is still as ethnically pure as you'll find anywhere. And the ethnicity that matters for the ius sanguinis is legal ethnicity, no matter how absurd it looks on its face. There are loopholes, there are residents, there is a large population of Arab Israelis, there is pressure on the law. But it still stands.
It's paradoxical, but the cultural and physical reality of Isareli ethnic diversity comes from legal ethnic restriction and privilege. And a switch to a purely cultural, i.e., religious, definition would create a more straitened ethnic reality. It's just one more evidence of the absurdity inherent in legally defining race and ethnicity.
To be fair, however, we should note that the idea that an ethnic definition of citizenship is inherently racist is a both very American and very recent. Most countries in Europe have at least some elements of ius sanguinis in their citizenship codes. We are the outlier with our complete lack of same. And 50 years ago when Israel was founded, such laws didn't strike anybody as inherently racist. It was the US occupation force, after all, that wrote Germany's citizenship code based on the law of return. We could have given them a new one. There were several huge conjunctural reasons weighing against changing the law, and that probably cut debate short. But there were no serious objections to it as being inherently racist, not even when it was being considered in relation to the most murderously racist regime in history. That's just not the way people thought back then. People like Woodrow Wilson were considered liberals. Israel's use of a law of return seemed normal at the time too -- just the attempt by secular progressive socialists to found what used to be called during the Cold War the only Eastern European democracy. The ethnic cleansing that accompanied all such foundings was just considered an unfortunate and conjunctural side effect.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com