Israeli news reports revealed on Thursday that one of the main conflicts between the Likud and religious parties before the signing of coalition deals in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday morning was the amendment of the Law of Return.
Ultimately, all of the parties in the next government agreed that the Law of Return will be amended by March 31, 2023.
Section 53 of the coalition agreement signed with the UTJ party states that “in light of the need to fulfill the purposes of the Law of Return and bring about the aliyah of Jews to Israel; in light of the distribution and characteristics of the immigration in recent years; in light of the difficulties and loopholes created by the grandchild clause in the Law of Return; and the need to prevent assimilation in Israel and to prevent the abuse of the rights granted by the State by immigrants who return to their land of origin shortly after their aliyah to Israel – legislative amendments required to support proper immigration policy will be carried out by the time the 2023 state budget is passed.”
A similar clause is included in the coalition agreement between Likud and the Religious Zionist Party.
The Center for Israeli Immigration Policy, which supported the demand of the religious parties to amend the Law of Return, stated: “After many long months of work to amend the Law of Return, the move is now being implemented. The goal is to end the absurd situation in which immigration to Israel creates a demographic deficit for the Jewish majority. The data we revealed to the elected officials led to the fact that there was no one who failed to understand the need to amend the Law of Return.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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4 Responses
B”H! This provides incredible stability to Klal Yisroel!
May this lead to the ultimate shleimus ha’Am & shleimus ha’Aretz through shleimus ha’Torah which will herald in the Geula shleima!
So they’re going to take care of a relatively minor problem, but not going to make the main change that the law has needed for fifty years: To restore the word כהלכה to the giyur clause. Every day that this is not amended has been a chilul haShem, an open statement by the state that it rejects the Torah. And they’re still not going to fix it. Instead they’re worried about goyim who are not pretending to be Jews, and are not seeking to marry Jews, and simply want to live in Israel just like millions of Arabs do. That’s not ideal, but it’s not such a huge problem.
Banning secular persons of Jewish descent will seriously alienate the bulk of those who consider themselves Jews in the diaspora, which will seriously destroy political and economic support for the medinah. Announcing that Reform, Conservative, Reconstruction and unaffiliated Jews are really goyim means they will see Israel as an enemy. This will be, de facto, an event similar to the “Treff banquet”, and will split the Jewish community permanently,probably with devastating impact for the medinah (consider, for example, someone like Chuck Schumer who has been fairly consistently supporting Israel – however frum Jews are a small part of his constituency and are increasingly likely to vote Republican — up to now he had a large pro-Israel constituency since most persons of Jewish descent are Democrats who support Israel — but when the new Law of Return redefines them as goyim, they will cease supporting Israel, and since most of them are fairly “liberal”, they will join the “progressives” in opposing Israel).
Akuperma, that is nonsense. Goyim of Jewish descent don’t support Israel anyway. US policy on Israel has nothing to do with the Jewish vote, since non-Orthodox Jews will always vote Democrat no matter what. It is driven entirely by philosemitic Evangelicals and other Christians, who don’t pretend to be Jewish but believe in the promise Hashem made Avraham, ואברכה מברכך ומקללך אאור.