Newly proposed legislation – the Immigration Basic Law – concerns the entry, immigration, and status of individuals already here or seeking to enter the country.
Having passed its initial reading, the bill, originally sponsored by Simcha Rothman, chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, has the potential to negatively impact the rights of minorities in the Jewish state, including family members of long-term citizens, asylum seekers, refugees, and anyone who isn’t Jewish.
And while the issue of non-Jews may be of less interest to most, the more worrisome part is what happens to Jews who may want to immigrate to Israel.
Many of them could soon be seeking refuge from the ever-growing antisemitism that is beginning to become a real threat throughout the world.
But their rights may also be in jeopardy as the result of an Orthodox coalition whose preference is to bring in more of their own persuasion, and fewer non-observant, secular Diaspora Jews.
This type of heavy-handed legislative overreach is of great concern to a large number of Israelis. They realized that a one-size-fits-all religious coalition could easily take measures to recreate their own vision of the Jewish homeland – one that looks very different from the state as it developed over the last 76 years.
Throughout those years, Israel became a multi-woven tapestry of individuals who came from very diverse backgrounds, cultures, religious persuasions, and lifestyles. It was a result of their dispersion, throughout every corner of the earth, that caused them to see things differently.
Nor were they compelled to conform to one expression of faith or thought. They were free to marry whoever they wanted and live in accordance with their conscience and personal conviction. No one, in their respective countries, or even here, ever interfered.
Now, this present coalition is seeking to change that status quo by force. Should this bill become law, it could mean that if a Jew fails to meet their specified criteria of religious observance, or other factors in such a law, they could be denied entrance and citizenship. How is that any different from the 1939 voyage of the St. Louis ocean liner, filled with European Jews seeking the safety of a country to take them in, but instead were turned away and sent back to a hostile country, where most of them perished?
This proposed law has the potential to completely undermine the 1950 Law of Return, established to ensure that Jews of all stripes are guaranteed a homeland, without any strings attached. There were no hoops to jump through or committee before whom one had to be scrutinized to see if they met the arbitrary criteria of the ultra-religious – making them “kosher enough” to be granted what already morally belongs to them, no matter what they think or believe.
At a time when so many troubling events are occurring in almost every country, to propose such a bill is deliberately myopic, since most Diaspora Jews are not religiously observant or even connected to their local, organized Jewish communities.
For whatever reason, they have opted out. But that doesn’t cancel their ethnicity, nor does being unattached from the religion guarantee that they will not be persecuted. They still remain members of the tribe, even if they do not attend a synagogue or observe Jewish dietary laws.
Does compassion for their destiny begin and end with the choices that they have made for their lives and their families? Does any government coalition have the ethical and moral right to be the final judge over the fate of millions of Jews who may not fit their preferred template of who is a worthy Jew?
If so, we may end up witnessing another Holocaust that will have been facilitated by the hands of our own extreme government, choosing to abandon our Jewish brothers and sisters and refusing them entrance to the Jewish state during their greatest time of need.
But maybe that was the plan all along, because if you’re trying to recreate a nation that promotes only one voice, character, and philosophy of what it means to be Jewish, then it stands to reason that it would be to the exclusion of all others.
A closed-door policy is antithetical to the Jewish people
The problem is that it reflects a closed-door policy and doesn’t allow freedom of choice. What is the benefit of that? Where is the mercy, for which we are known, as the people who rush to help others in their greatest moments of need?
It is this type of snobbish elitism that is antithetical to the Jewish people. We were often not afforded generosity by others who could have saved us, but instead chose to turn their backs on us. When did the most religious among us forget our own story of survival? Why would we do this to ourselves?
Such a narrow-minded bill can only spell disaster for Diaspora Jews, as well as those already here. What will prevent a citizen from being expelled from their ancestral homeland if they are deemed to be the type of Jew who is frowned upon by the ultra-religious? We already know that their definition of a Jew is extremely one-sided, even to the point of not allowing the children of a Jewish father to marry in Israel if the mother is not Jewish.
Allowing such a bill to become law would jeopardize almost every secular Jew, both in the country and outside of it, since everything would be at the sole discretion of the religious monopoly that controls these matters.
Ironically, the majority of American Jews became liberal, believing that supporting all others would afford them the same rights. Now, if this bill is passed into law, it’s likely that many of them will pay a steep price for having been too tolerant.
It should be noted that the Israel Bar Association does not support this legislative initiative, probably because it’s fraught with so many potential problems. This is no time to make it tougher on Jews who may be considering the move to Israel. We owe that to them now, more than ever.
The writer is a former Jerusalem elementary and middle school principal. She is also the author of Mistake-Proof Parenting, available on Amazon, based on the time-tested wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs.