Sure, but the law is about what is permitted, not about what is usual. If somebody with no ethnic Jewish heritage converts to the religion of Judaism, that person is covered by the provisions of the Law of Return, just as ethnic Jews are.
Yes, there is a lot of blurring between ethnicity and religion in the case of Judaism, but it’s not true that they’re precisely the same thing.
? What response does it need? It is true that non-Jewish Druze are required to serve in the Israeli army and many ultra-Orthodox Jews do not, but that doesn’t invalidate the point that the military service law draws distinctions between Jews and non-Jews.
Again, the attempt to interpret Israeli law as considering only ethnicity rather than religion in its differential treatment of citizens is a bit creaky. For another thing, many Israeli Jews and Arabs are not that different ethnically; some are certainly much more ethnically similar than, say, some Jews with Middle Eastern heritage are to some Russian Jews (which reflects, among other things, the fact that a number of Middle Eastern Muslims are descended from Jewish-born converts to Islam). Judaism is a unique and separate religion, but it is not a unique and separate ethnic category.
You seem to be of the view that they are dichotomous - that if something is a “religion”, it cannot also be an “ethnicity”.
This, however, is not how Jews view Judaism, and it is not how anthropologists view ethnicity.
More to the point, it does not demonstrate some sort of fundamental difference in terms of “laws of return” to what many other countries do.
On the contrary. It quite clearly invalidates the point that there is “fundamental religious discrimination”.
The “discrimination” here is that some groups within Israel, Jewish or not, object to serving in the military, and the state accomodates them; others do not - Jewish or not.
This is no different than handing out “conciencious objector” status to Quakers.
Again, you make these statements, but what exactly are you basing them on? What, in your opinion, is “ethnicity”?
Obviously a Black Jew from Etheopia is not racially the same as a Jew from Poland, but they are of the same ethnicity. “Ethnicity” is not “race”; it may not even be “culture”. What it is, is that organizing, centralizing principle of allegiance or belonging to a group identity that is chosen by the members - such as, for example, Judaism.
A Mizrai Jew and an Arab may have many cultural traits in common, and even a common ancestry; they do not however consider each other as being part of the same “ethnicity”, any more that the (equally similar) Greeks and Turks do.
Not so rare, these days. There are an estimated 200,000 of us who have converted to Judaism in the US, and others in other countries. That’s around 1% of the total world population of Jews.
Anecdotally, the majority of people who convert do so because their SO is Jewish (and that number is matched by the number of Jews converting the other way) - I could be wrong on this, but I doubt it. Under the “law of return”, these people would have been eligible anyway, even if they did not convert:
Thus, the only people who are in contention here are those who convert but who are not married to a Jew or have any family relationship to a Jew. Those numbers are gonna be pretty small - I’d say a fraction of that 1%.
No, I’m not. I acknowledged quite clearly that “there is a lot of blurring between ethnicity and religion in the case of Judaism”. Judaism is a religion and also an ethnicity, but that doesn’t mean that ethnicity and religion are indistinguishable entities.
Sorry, but it does. For example, a person with no traceable German heritage who is not a German citizen cannot somehow “convert to Germanhood” and thereby acquire special immigration status under German law. However, a non-Jewish person with no traceable Jewish heritage can convert to Judaism and thereby receive the same special status as other Jews under Israeli immigration law. That’s a fundamental difference.
The size of the number is irrelevant to my point. The point is that there is a class of people who have converted to the Jewish religion who have no traceable Jewish genetic/family heritage, and that those people are awarded the same preferential status in Israeli immigration laws as other Jews.
That is qualitatively different from the “national heritage” preferences that many other countries apply to immigration candidates.
Yes, it is. Quakers are given conscientious objector status because they share a belief system in which violence, and hence military service, is prohibited. But Israeli Muslims and Christians as a group are not ideologically opposed to military service in the abstract: in fact, some of them even serve in the Israeli army as volunteers.
So according to your definitions, the Israeli conscription laws manifest not religious discrimination, but ethnic discrimination.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that Israel is necessarily wrong in its choices about applying certain laws differently to different groups of people. I’m just pointing out that it’s not true that there is no meaningful difference between Israel’s practice and the practices of many other self-described democracies.
Except that in this case Israel is quite clearly using the category as an ethnic category.
Nonsense. All they must do, in many cases, to “convert” to whatever “ethnicity” is to … marry someone of that ethnicity.
Proof:
[Emphasis added]
A non-ethnically-German person married to a German exactly fulfills your stated criteria.
This statement …
“…a person with no traceable German heritage who is not a German citizen cannot somehow “convert to Germanhood” and thereby acquire special immigration status under German law”.
… is proven 100% wrong.
The Ukranian wife of an ethnic German is a “person with no tracable German heritage…” who has somehow “…converted to Germanhood…” and thus “…acquire[d] special immigration status under German law”.
Certainly there are differences - some tiny minority of people can, without any family connection to a Jew, become a Jew by conversion - but just how long are you going to continue to move the goalposts before conceding that the differences are vanishingly minor?
… as are “spouses” of “ethnic Germans”, who are equally not German - yet are treated as such by law.
No, it is not. As can be seen by actually examining the facts, plenty of “non-ethnic-Germans” are considered “Germans” for reasons of the law.
They are presumed (usually quite correctly) to have ideological opposition to serving in the Israel military. They can volunteer if this presumption is incorrect.
No, for two reasons.
First, you have once again confused ethnicity with religion - Ultra-Orthodox Jews are not ethnically different from other Jews, for example. The imporatnt distinction in this case is ideology.
Second, because “accomodation” does not have the same perjorative meaning as “discrimination”.
Your original post stated that Israel was engaged in (your words) “fundamental religious discrimination” - one example given was conscription. This strongly implies an invidious or negative “discrimination” based on religion - that is, that certain disfavoured groups are harmed by the official policy, as in “Jim Crow” laws. The impression of an invidious discrimination is strengthened by the insistance that no other Western Democracy does the same: the notion would appear to be that the Israeli state sets out to deny members of certain religious or ethnic groups rights on the basis of their religion or ethnicity - something which we in the West, rightly, set ourselves against.
However, when the actual facts are examined, the truth is in this case turns out to be 100% the opposite. The Israeli state does not, in this case, give rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. Rather, it relieves certain groups, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, of the obligation of conscription based on the fact that the ideology generally held by these particular groups is opposed to military service in the Israeli state.
Thus, what is in fact a somewhat admirable accomodation of difference is turned, somehow, into an example of “fundamental religious discrimination”.
The proof? The groups affected (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews) are all in favour of the so-called “discrimination”. I am quite certain that any attempt made to remove said “discrimination” would result in serious unhappiness among those allegedly “discriminated against”.
And in that you are wrong, on the examples you have cited.
You’re desperately reaching here. Yes, one can get preferential immigration status in many countries just by marrying someone who already has preferential status in that country. But that is not the same as independently converting.
Would-be German immigrants can marry Germans. Would-be Israeli immigrants can marry Jews or independently convert to Judaism. That’s a difference.
There is no goalpost-moving here, at least not by me. I never made any claim about the statistical significance of the number of non-Jewish people unrelated to Jews who convert to Judaism.
All that I noted, and what I still rightly insist on, is that the very existence of such a category of persons, and the fact that they have special status in Israeli immigration law, makes Israeli immigration law in this respect fundamentally different from, say, German immigration law.
Okay, if the negative connotations of “discrimination” are what’s really been the bug up your butt in this discussion, I’m happy to replace the term by “differential treatment”.
You are the one who laid down the criteria: that someone who is not of a particular ethnicity can nevertheless be considered to be of that ethnicity for purposes of immigration law.
Marriage is one way of doing that. If there is some sort of extraordinarily significant difference between marriage and conversion, please make a case for it.
To my mind, both are of a kind: a self-chosen act that can make a person self-identify with a particular ethnic group they were not born into.
You keep “insisting” on it, but you have not said why this difference is of any significance at all - other than that you think it is.
Of course it is the “bug up [my] butt”, since it is hard to honestly interpret “fundamental religious discriminiation” that is “fundamentally different” from what anyone else in the West does as being anything but a negative characterization; which in these particular cases are not warranted.
Marriage changes one’s immigration status based on an individual’s establishment of a close family association with another person, not based on the individual’s own identity. Conversion, on the other hand, actually changes the individual’s own identity, irrespective of any family associations whatever.
You can marry a German, or marry a Jew. You can independently convert to Judaism, but you cannot independently convert to “Germanity”.
You have not said why the difference is significant - you are merely restating what the difference is.
To my mind, the significant issue is that a person in both cases is, of their own free actions, capable of obtaining the legal status required for immigration. They need not be “born” to it; they can acquire it.
Nope. Marriage is not just about one individual’s “own free actions”; it’s about the association of the individual with another individual who already has that legal status. No matter how much one individual may wish to freely marry a person with the desired legal status, they can’t do it unless some such person wishes to marry them. Conversion, on the other hand, really is dependent on the individual’s own free actions.
In other words, the spouse is piggybacking on another person’s existing status, as a member of a couple. The convert is independently changing his/her own status as an individual.