Absurd Alhazred posted:

Not that I want to sperg too much on one of my rhetorical points, but how hard do you really think it would be for the Israeli security establishment to crack down on expression on the internet? They have the technology, they just need the cultural shift.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

For some Israelis this is important. For a rising elite of religious zealots like Bennett, that's not as important as being a proud Jew. And historically the main reason Israel isn't competing in Asian sports is boycotts. So what did they do when boycotted? They said "fine, we'll go somewhere else". If the Russian angle gains enough traction, maybe Israel competes with Free Eastern Ukraine Republic, Crimea, Russia, Kazakhstan, etc.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

As I have repeatedly articulated in this thread and its predecessor, my alternative is many-pronged. It includes removing blanket US support while bolstering EU settlement-targeted sanctions. It includes supporting left-wing parties in Israel, but also centrists who are exposing the monetary cost of the settlement project to the rest of the population, which is severe. The very fact that the settlers need to hide their expenditures from the larger public shows, as did the Disengagement, that in and of themselves, the settlers are not popular among other Israeli Jews. They are parasitic on a sense that the Right is more Secure. In terms of internal politics that is what needs to be fought. It needs to be clear that settlements are not making Israel more secure, quite the contrary.

I am not saying that this is guaranteed to work. But global sanctions and particularly academic and cultural boycotts are an excellent way to push centrists into the right-winger's hands. If you make them feel ashamed to be Israelis, period, while the settlers make them feel proud, who do you think they will choose? Who won in 1980, Reagan or Carter?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I have done that before. They are not very effective, but even with the craziness over the summer my friends who have done this have been hit no further than being beaten up a bit. I am looking for other ways because I don't see those demonstrations as having been very effective. Israeli leftists have been cast as antisemitic caricatures, outside of their natural demographics it'll take a lot of work.

DarkCrawler posted:

Uh, insanely hard? Pretty sure Israeli Jews value their democracy, even if they don't like Arabs having any. Just like white South Africans. The situation between it and NK or Iran aren't really comparable, neither had ever experienced anything else but total authoritarianism, be it Japanese Empire or the Shah,

quote:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_State_of_Palestine

Once the West (US) is gone, that's it for Israel. Russia and China aren't going to choose it over Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, etc. when it has no advantages to offer them over the entire 1+billion Muslim world.

quote:

Or, it will push center-rightists into the center, and have leftist peace plans sound a lot more attractive, when they realize that they're going to become destitute without the economy of the world engaging with them.

quote:

The settlers won't make anyone feel proud while the economy is on a free fall and they're complete pariahs.

quote:

When Reagan won, nobody was about to exclude US from the rest of the world, and nobody ever will. But Israel isn't big enough for that. South Africans didn't suddenly decide to become non-racist overnight, they decided that they value not being dirt poor and their children's future more then keeping the blacks down.

quote:

International boycotts and sanctions would also make it virtually impossible to subsidize settlements without huge cuts on Israel proper.

quote:

If settlers weren't popular before, would they really be more popular after the world made it clear they are mostly to blame for making everyone's lives lovely?

emanresu tnuocca posted:

Israel is not south africa. It's like the opening sentence of Anna Karenina you know? Every opressive regime is opressive in its own way, you think that through 'shaming' (whatever that is, I'm not sure inflammatory rhetoric has the same psychological effects as some of you think it does) you can convince an entire nation of people who are sure that the entire world has been out to get them and their ancestors since time immemorial that the people they view as their sworn enemies are actually the true victims and that as soon as they just ease off a bit with the whole apartheid thing everything will rapidly become much better and that they wouldn't have to worry about busses going off anymore? Can you only envision one single outcome to this whole thing?

I agree with Absurd, this determinism and the insistence upon viewing every occurance as being a manifestation of something else that has previously happened seems to me more intellectually lazy than anything else. I do not presume to predict the future or know what's going to happen around here, things could end up way worse for both nations than they are now just as well as they could improve.

SedanChair posted:

Somehow I don't take any comfort in them just being "beaten up a bit." Most bad lawless violence starts with people just being beaten up a bit.

Main Paineframe posted:

Personally, I would say here that foreign politics and perceptions are not the single most important thing in Israeli politics, or even a primary factor. A growing number of Israelis want to ban women and men sitting next to each other in public.

quote:

Apartheid is not by any means the only policy Israel holds that is distasteful to the first-world. How effective has "being told by the West that they should be ashamed" worked at improving the treatment of women in other Middle Eastern countries - or even, for that matter, in countering the slow decline of women's rights in Israel? And if your answer to that isn't really a positive one, then why do you expect the disapproval of white people to be any more effective at countering racism in Israel than it has been in countering sexism in the Middle East? Israel is not really that similar to South Africa - the I/P issue much more closely mirrors the US vs the Native Americans back in the heyday of Manifest Destiny.

Main Paineframe posted:

Personally, I would say here that foreign politics and perceptions are not the single most important thing in Israeli politics, or even a primary factor. A growing number of Israelis want to ban women and men sitting next to each other in public. Apartheid is not by any means the only policy Israel holds that is distasteful to the first-world. How effective has "being told by the West that they should be ashamed" worked at improving the treatment of women in other Middle Eastern countries - or even, for that matter, in countering the slow decline of women's rights in Israel? And if your answer to that isn't really a positive one, then why do you expect the disapproval of white people to be any more effective at countering racism in Israel than it has been in countering sexism in the Middle East? Israel is not really that similar to South Africa - the I/P issue much more closely mirrors the US vs the Native Americans back in the heyday of Manifest Destiny.

SedanChair posted:

Well that's the sad truth of it. Palestinians can become noble figures of resistance once Israel has dispersed and annihilated them completely. One would like to believe that things have changed, but what's changed is it's now a CAT D9 with a pintle mounted GPMG instead of a train car bristling with tourists wielding Sharps buffalo rifles.

Dolash posted:

Sometimes I do wonder if there aren't Israelis who deliberately aim at what happened to the Native Americans as a model to be emulated. When Americans are critical of Israel it's often countered that America was a violent settler state that displaced a native population too, and while many Americans are quite sensitive about that these days and it's increasingly viewed as a tragedy and genocide everyone also agrees that it's much too late to do very much about it.

For someone with a long enough view of history, it might look like a workable strategy to be horrible, murderous settlers and destroy a native population, then raise a generation afterward that's critical of and ashamed by that history but welp what can you do what's done is done. Sort of the grand version of a fait accompli, and a good way to get your country accepted back into the fold once the generation bearing direct responsibility disappears. If the Palestinians are sufficiently destroyed, divided into little ghettos and Bantustans, left with no coherent political identity, isolated from each other and eventually dwindling away while Israel flourishes and grows, maybe fifty or a hundred years from now Israelis will sincerely regret their treatment of the Palestinians - now that they can't possibly pose a threat to Israel.

Dolash posted:

Sometimes I do wonder if there aren't Israelis who deliberately aim at what happened to the Native Americans as a model to be emulated. When Americans are critical of Israel it's often countered that America was a violent settler state that displaced a native population too, and while many Americans are quite sensitive about that these days and it's increasingly viewed as a tragedy and genocide everyone also agrees that it's much too late to do very much about it.

For someone with a long enough view of history, it might look like a workable strategy to be horrible, murderous settlers and destroy a native population, then raise a generation afterward that's critical of and ashamed by that history but welp what can you do what's done is done. Sort of the grand version of a fait accompli, and a good way to get your country accepted back into the fold once the generation bearing direct responsibility disappears. If the Palestinians are sufficiently destroyed, divided into little ghettos and Bantustans, left with no coherent political identity, isolated from each other and eventually dwindling away while Israel flourishes and grows, maybe fifty or a hundred years from now Israelis will sincerely regret their treatment of the Palestinians - now that they can't possibly pose a threat to Israel.

Disinterested posted:

I feel as if it may be worth mentioning that if all of the world's Jews came to Israel, as Bibi wants, there probably isn't space for them in the current borders.

stereobreadsticks posted:

I lived in Montana for a couple of years and I have to say that I've never heard more unabashedly racist rhetoric about minorities than I heard from white people up there about Native Americans.

Xandu posted:

Of course snubbing in this case still means sending a senior official.

SyHopeful posted:

You haven't heard white Alaskans talk about Alaska Natives.

quote:

Israeli Jews Who Aren't Jewish in Eyes of Rabbis Face Kafkaesque Conversion Plight
Immigrants Make Aliyah But Rejected by Rabbinate

Not Jewish Enough? Maxim and Alina Serjukov had to move to another town in Israel after a rabbi rejected their efforts to convert.

They live as part of Jewish society in the Jewish state, but the state itself does not consider them Jewish.

For Israel, some 330,000 immigrants, mostly from the former Soviet Union, represent a big assimilation problem and a big political problem, made worse by the fact that the only solution for this largely non-religious group is seen as a religious one. And the remedy lies exclusively in the hands of the country’s state-sponsored Orthodox rabbis, who, under Israeli civil law, have sole authority to determine the Jewish status of the state’s citizens.

Now, the latest effort to address this problem has collapsed, as the Orthodox political party that was key to reform on many other fronts has balked. The religious-Zionist Jewish Home party, a member of the current government coalition, supported recent legislation to draft Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, for the first time; approved a liberalizing overhaul of marriage procedures, and created a modest dedicated space at the Western Wall for non-Orthodox prayer.

Yet the same party backing these religious reforms — the most progressive passed by any recent Israeli government — appears to have sabotaged a bill to help would-be converts.

That promises to leave the large number of Russian immigrants in Israel who are not considered Jewish under Orthodox religious law in limbo. They came into Israel under an immigration law that permits anyone who can claim one Jewish grandparent to become a citizen. But this large population now faces the disabilities imposed by other laws that use Orthodox religious law to determine one’s status as a Jew. This includes marriage law in Israel, where there is no civil marriage, and only individuals recognized as Jewish under traditional religious law may marry other Jews. Non-Jews wishing to marry Jews are forced to go abroad to wed, and then apply to have their foreign marriages registered and recognized in Israel. Except for converts, Orthodox religious law considers a Jew to be only someone with a Jewish mother.

The Israeli reality TV star Alin Levy, whose parents were born in the FSU, is the latest prominent person to get caught in this bind. Despite living a Modern Orthodox lifestyle, she cannot marry unless she converts or goes abroad. And as a condition of converting, she claims, the state’s Chief Rabbinate demanded that she abandon her television career.

It is unclear how many Jews from the FSU might be interested in converting. As it is, this overwhelmingly secular population has displayed little enthusiasm to become religiously Jewish, even as they become ever more part of Israel’s secular Jewish society. But today, anybody who wants a state-recognized conversion has to go through the centralized Conversion Authority, whose religious courts have a reputation for being unwelcoming and intimidating. Elazar Stern, a coalition lawmaker from the centrist Hatnuah party, proposed decentralizing the operation and allowing all municipal rabbis to perform conversions.

This would not have diluted the Orthodox standards for conversion; the Chief Rabbinate, which currently supervises the Conversion Authority, oversees all municipal rabbis. But Stern hoped that it would allow prospective converts the freedom to at least choose a rabbi that they find welcoming.

The Jewish Home party initially supported Stern’s bill. But then, just before the Knesset’s Passover recess, the party turned against it. Jewish Home’s switch followed the lead of the Chief Rabbinate, which feared a reduction in day-to-day control of conversion.

“They prefer to strengthen the Chief Rabbinate instead of helping citizens,” Stern’s aide Tani Frank complained in an interview with the Forward.

The bill is currently frozen and seen as having reached a dead end, thanks to the effective veto of Jewish Home politicians in the government. “They fail to understand that there’s a solution and that they may, at some point, have to go against the rabbinate to bring it about,” Frank said.

The most surprising part of the saga is the attitude that drives the rabbinate’s opposition to the reform: It doesn’t trust its own rabbis around the country. Municipal rabbis are the face of the rabbinate to most citizens — the only state rabbis they will ever meet. They are responsible for registering weddings and running religious services in their regions. But there is a “concern” in the Chief Rabbinate that some of them couldn’t be trusted to perform conversions according to proper religious standards, a source in the organization familiar with the topic told the Forward.

The source, who did not have clearance to speak to the media and therefore requested anonymity, said that municipal rabbis currently fulfill functions that are important but “reversible and not so severe according to Halacha,” the Hebrew term for traditional religious law. Conversion, he said, is a different matter.

About 2,000 Israeli citizens convert each year — mostly immigrants from the FSU who are not considered halachically Jewish and their offspring. Yet as a result of births and continued immigration, the number of residents in this demographic group lacking Jewish status increases by more than 5,000 people annually.

According to Seth Farber, an Orthodox rabbi who directs ITIM, an advocacy group for converts and prospective converts, this growth poses challenges to the assimilation of these immigrants for which Israel doesn’t have answers.

In a letter Farber showed to the Forward, one couple wrote that they had “given up on our dream of a Jewish home in Israel, and as a result halted the conversion process” more than a year after the non-Jewish partner decided to convert. They blamed the “degrading and arrogant” approach of the conversion court to which they were summoned — one of four run by the Conversion Authority. This included repeated interrogation, they said, as to whether they go to church, despite stating that they don’t. Farber, whose office received the letter, said that there are many converts who do not even get as far as this couple.

Another West European immigrant told the Forward she was told to marry her Jewish fiancé the same day she converted if she wanted a marriage license. The rabbis’ demand stemmed from the fact that the couple were already living together. The rabbis insisted that they should not be in each other’s company unmarried after the conversion, because of stringent religious modesty laws that would now apply to her as a Jew.

As a result, her family members, who live in Europe, couldn’t attend her wedding last summer. The rabbis “said they didn’t care and that we should just bring wine and bourekas [stuffed pastries] and it would be okay,” the woman recalled. “They ruined the best day of my life.”

Her wedding-day conversion was actually her third conversion to Judaism. The woman said that she had undergone a Conservative conversion in Europe and a conversion with the New York Orthodox rabbi Marc Angel, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan. Neither of these passed muster with the Israeli rabbinate.

The couple’s unmarried co-habitation provoked harsh comments from the Israeli conversion court, the woman said. Members of the conversion court told them they “live like animals,” she recounted. The process made her feel like a “nonkosher piece of meat,” she said. Though she is now converted and married, she insisted her name not be published, due to the sensitivity of the subject.

While some liberal Orthodox religious-Zionists like Farber argued for Stern’s reform bill, the right wing of the Religious Zionist camp fought it tooth and nail. The influential rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of Jerusalem’s Ateret Cohanim yeshiva, told the Forward that conversion is just too important to be entrusted to local rabbis. “Each rabbi decides things for his community, but with conversion, you are making decisions for the whole Jewish nation,” he said. “The rabbinate for this is the Chief Rabbinate, and only it should decide.”

quote:

(Haaretz) — The struggle against the ultra-Orthodox grip on Israel’s Chief Rabbinate in issues of personal status in Israel has a new, and very attractive, poster girl. Alin Levy, an Israeli reality TV star, says she has been told she cannot complete the process of converting to Judaism because she is an actress.

Levy blasted into the national consciousness four years ago when she was one of the most popular contestants in the Israeli version of the highly rated reality show sensation “Big Brother.” One of the youngest ever to participate in the show, at age 18, Levy was an audience favorite with her cheerful and ditzy ‘girl-next-door’ persona. Her blonde good looks, of course, didn’t hurt.

After reaching the finals of the show - but not winning - she completed her service in the Israel Defense Forces and kept a high profile - parlaying her celebrity into stints as a television gossip reporter and performer on panel shows. Constantly tracked by paparazzi, she had a high profile in the Tel Aviv social scene, complete with a Kardashian-esque sports star boyfriend.

But a few years ago, she took a deliberate step out of the spotlight. A profile of Levy published in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Friday explained that, at the ripe old age of 23, she decided to change her life and take a more serious direction - to leave her pop culture gigs and immerse herself in Chekhov and Shakespeare at a prestigious acting school. The spread on Levy’s ‘new life’ was illustrated with an artistic photo of Levy lighting Sabbath candles and was headlined with the revelation that she was converting to Judaism.

Levy immigrated to Israel from Ukraine when she was four years old. Her father was Jewish, and though her mother met the legal requirements for immigration to Israel thanks to her Jewish grandfather, she was not considered Jewish according to religious law (halakha), and so neither was Alin. Alin said she had felt Jewish all her life in Israel. It was during her military service that she began to be troubled by that fact that as far as the Chief Rabbinate was concerned, she was not Jewish.

It upset her that she wasn’t ‘officially’ considered a member of the religion, and, according to the interview, she determined to become a full-fledged kosher Jew, she began the procedure for Orthodox conversion, studying Torah three hours each week, dressing modestly, making blessings over her food and began to observe Shabbat. Asked if she might become fully Orthodox in the end, she responded “I can’t rule it out.”

The process is standard operating procedure for secular Israelis who want to complete conversion. In order to do so, they are required to adopt a lifestyle that is far more observant to become Jewish in the eyes of the stringent conversion court.

But for the court supervising Levy’s conversion - it wasn’t enough.

Shortly after the newspaper article appeared, the story broke in the media that Levy had been told she could not continue toward conversion if she insisted on continuing to study acting and working as a performer.

She told the press Sunday that she was shocked by the news that came in a phone call from the rabbi she was studying with toward conversion, who was acting as her liaison to the conversion court. He said he was told by the conversion authority that “An acting career does not go together with the spirit of the religion.”

She said she was rebuffed when she asked to meet with the rabbinate to discuss her case, and so, feeling like she had nothing to lose, she went public with the fact that she had been told that she couldn’t be an actress and a Jew at the same time.

A devastated Levy went on television with her sadness and anger on Sunday, saying that “the whole thing made me feel like damaged goods.”

Levy’s story is far from unusual, says Rabbi Seth Farber, whose organization ITIM helps people navigate Israel’s religious bureaucracy.

“It is a complete absurdity” Farber said, for someone to be rejected as a candidate for a conversion because of choosing a career in acting, but he has seen similar occurences.

“We’ve had people who work as nurses being told they couldn’t convert because their job requires them to work shifts on the Sabbath,” he said. Farber added that he believed her case could be moved through the system with the proper approach and that he hoped she would pursue the issue and wouldn’t give up. Many secular Israelis have done just that - abandoning the conversion process in disgust, or in aminority of cases, converting with Conservative or Reform rabbis although they knew their conversion won’t be recognized by the state authorities.

Whatever the result for Levy, the public awareness stirred up by her plight adds fuel to the fire of dissatisfaction and anger toward the rabbinate in the Israeli public as the gap between the realities of modern Jewish life and their ultra-Orthodox outlook grows wider and wider.

quote:

The High Court of Justice ruled on Thursday that a rabbinical court was within its rights to retroactively annul a conversion because the convert in question had deceived the court when she said she undertook to observe Jewish law.

The ruling could reopen the wounds of the conversion crisis in 2008 when the Supreme Rabbinical Court upheld a decision of a lower court that invalidated a woman’s conversion because it said she never intended to observe Jewish law when she converted. The ruling endangered the 40,000 conversions conducted under the state-conversion system.

On Thursday, Deputy President of the Supreme Court Justice Miriam Naor, with Justices Esther Hayut and Neal Hendel ruled on a case concerning a woman born in Romania to a Christian family who converted in Israel in the state conversion system. Two years later, the rabbinical court annulled her conversion because, according to the court, doubts had been raised as to the sincerity of the convert when she converted.

She petitioned the High Court saying the rabbinical court did not have the authority to retroactively invalidate her conversion and that its decision violated the principles of natural justice.

The state attorney said the contrary saying the rabbinical court did have the authority to annul the conversion and was justified in doing so.

In its ruling on Thursday, the court said the woman had in fact “changed her lifestyle dramatically a very short while after completing her conversion, so that practically speaking nothing at all was left of her observance of Jewish law that the petitioner accepted upon herself.”

The justices said that when the rabbinical court reached its factual conclusion that its original decision to approve the conversion was made on a fraudulent basis, there was no place for the High Court to revoke the authority of the rabbinical court to annul its own decision.

Naor emphasized howevever that “our ruling is only regarding a conversion that was obtained deceitfully. One cannot take from our ruling that the rabbinical court for conversion has the authority annul conversions in other cases.”

The Hiddush religious freedom lobbying group criticized the decision saying it opened up “a Pandora’s box,” the results of which could be calamitous.

Hiddush director and Reform rabbi Uri Regev said it would require “extreme detachment from reality not to know that the majority of converts from the immigrant community from the former Soviet Union do this [conversion] without true intent to accept Torah and commandments upon themselves and are forced to promise false promises that they will observe the religious commandments.”

Regev said that following rabbis serving on the conversion courts “who are working under heavy pressure from the haredim, will be able to retroactively annul conversions with the blessing of the High Court of Justice.”

Director of the ITIM religious services advisory body said the ruling was a setback but it would not affect many people.

“The decision associates the conversion courts with the civil courts, a comparison that is specious at best,” Seth Farber said.

“The major flaw in the decision is that it says that someones behavior following a conversion is grounds for determining ones sincerity, but it does not give a timeline for evaluating behavior. In theory, a court could undermine a conversion years later. This is against normative practice in Jewish law and Jewish tradition. ITIM will work in the coming Knesset to make sure that converts rights are fully protected.”

Volkerball posted:

Skeemos is the weirdest racist term I've ever heard.

quote:

This includes marriage law in Israel, where there is no civil marriage, and only individuals recognized as Jewish under traditional religious law may marry other Jews. Non-Jews wishing to marry Jews are forced to go abroad to wed, and then apply to have their foreign marriages registered and recognized in Israel.

Cat Mattress posted:

If these people want to marry without quitting their job, they should just say "gently caress it" and emigrate to Western Europe.

Main Paineframe posted:

Jack of Hearts posted:

How does the law treat the marriage of two (non-Jewish) Arab Israelis?

Jack of Hearts posted:

How does the law treat the marriage of two (non-Jewish) Arab Israelis?

Jack of Hearts posted:

I'd almost expect them to attempt an Israeli Juche before yielding to world opinion.

Main Paineframe posted:

If they're both the same religion, then there's (usually) no problem; if it's an interfaith marriage, then they'll probably have to go abroad. Only marriages performed and approved by an official state-recognized religious authority, or marriages performed abroad, are recognized in Israel. That means that if you're Catholic, you can't get married unless the official state-recognized Catholic authorities in Israel approve your marriage; if you're Muslim, you can't get married unless the official state-recognized Muslim authorities approve your marriage, and so on and so forth. Altogether, there's about a dozen state-recognized religious authorities in Israel - the Orthodox Judaism Chief Rabbinate, the Muslim religious authorities, the Druze religious authorities, and nine Christian church sects. If you don't belong to one of those religious communities, or if you can't get your community's leadership to sign off on your marriage, then you have to leave the country to get married. There's no legal ban on interfaith marriages, but every single one of the religious authorities recognized by the Israeli state refuses to perform interfaith marriages, so the system amounts to a de facto ban.

V. Illych L. posted:

Is marriage recognised as an economic institution in Israel? I'm asking, 'cos if so, this basically amounts to officially discouraging miscegenation, doesn't it?

LORD OF BUTT posted:

You mean Jew-che?

Main Paineframe posted:

If they're both the same religion, then there's (usually) no problem; if it's an interfaith marriage, then they'll probably have to go abroad. Only marriages performed and approved by an official state-recognized religious authority, or marriages performed abroad, are recognized in Israel. That means that if you're Catholic, you can't get married unless the official state-recognized Catholic authorities in Israel approve your marriage; if you're Muslim, you can't get married unless the official state-recognized Muslim authorities approve your marriage, and so on and so forth. Altogether, there's about a dozen state-recognized religious authorities in Israel - the Orthodox Judaism Chief Rabbinate, the Muslim religious authorities, the Druze religious authorities, and nine Christian church sects. If you don't belong to one of those religious communities, or if you can't get your community's leadership to sign off on your marriage, then you have to leave the country to get married. There's no legal ban on interfaith marriages, but every single one of the religious authorities recognized by the Israeli state refuses to perform interfaith marriages, so the system amounts to a de facto ban.

Jack of Hearts posted:

And if the two parties are agnostic?

SedanChair posted:

Well that's the sad truth of it. Palestinians can become noble figures of resistance once Israel has dispersed and annihilated them completely.

V. Illych L. posted:

Would it be possible to establish an atheist community or whatever and try to empower that to conduct marriages? This way of doing it seems completely out of whack

"yeah, i'm a muslim and she's a christian, so we had to go and get married by the local communist cadre"

Jack of Hearts posted:

And if the two parties are agnostic?

It's remarkable to me that, the fact that I consider myself a reasonably skeptical person, despite the fact that I follow these threads and try to read as much as I can about the conflict, I've still internalized the popular American narrative about Israel being a liberal Western democracy* to the point where this theocratic nonsense is genuinely surprising and disconcerting.

* In a similar sense to the US in the 50s and prior being a LWD; I don't mean this phrase as code for "one of the good guys."

quote:

Only two spouses who are both certified by the religious courts as not meeting the religious definition of any faith recognized in Israel are entitled to register the relationship under this Law. In Israel, there are not many people who fit these requirements.

Couples that are registered as religion-less can apply to the appointed Registrar. Both spouses will need to provide documentation of their birth and citizenship. The Registrar will refer their request to the heads of the religious courts in Israel, who will review them and give an opinion on their eligibility for the law. In practice, the law that is supposed to provide a civil marriage alternative for non-Jewish immigrants in fact creates a new path in which non-Jews will have to be certified by the Rabbinate or other religious institution as having no recognized faith. Absurdly, the law forces those who have no religion to have their religious status defined by religious institutions. The bureaucratic procedure is invasive, intrusive and embarrassing. There is no doubt that the law expands the scope of religious coercion over the religion-less citizens in Israel.