The Knesset’s approval, last week, of a law allowing rabbinical and Sharia courts to arbitrate certain civil disputes was pitched by its backers as a narrow, voluntary expansion of choice. Critics, however, see something larger. For them, it is not merely another route for dispute resolution, but a change in the relationship between state law, religious authority, and the meaning of consent in communities where opting out may carry a price.
At the center of the debate is a legal distinction that can sound technical until its consequences come into focus. Adjudication is what state courts do when they issue binding judgments under public authority. Arbitration, by contrast, is generally understood as a private dispute-resolution mechanism in which parties agree to take a dispute out of the ordinary court system and submit it to a third party for decision.
In Israel, arbitration is already a familiar alternative to going to court: two sides can agree to have a dispute decided outside the ordinary civil system, while judges still keep a limited supervisory role.
That background is what makes the new law politically and legally charged. The legislation, which passed 65-41 after a late-night debate, authorizes rabbinical and Sharia courts to act as arbitrators in limited civil matters, as long as all parties consent. It excludes criminal and administrative matters, proceedings in which the state or a local authority is a party, and matters involving married or formerly married couples.
Supporters have framed that as an expansion of choice. The state, in this telling, is not forcing anyone into a religious forum, but allowing adults who want their disputes resolved according to religious law to choose that route.
Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman Simcha Rothman called the law a liberal measure, arguing there was “nothing more liberal” than letting consenting adults decide to resolve a dispute according to Torah law. The bill’s explanatory notes likewise cast the move as giving religious communities an alternative legal avenue acceptable to them.
But the strongest criticism of the law is not that arbitration itself is illegitimate. It is that the state has now formally inserted its own religious courts into a space that, in ordinary arbitration, is typically occupied by private arbitrators. Opponents say this is not merely a technical expansion of options, but a structural shift; one that gives state-backed religious forums a new role in civil disputes.
Move intended to ease pressure on civil courts
Critics also challenge one of the law’s most publicly cited benefits: easing pressure on the civil courts.
Arbitration is generally understood as a way to move disputes out of the public judicial system and into a private forum chosen by the parties. Here, they argue, the state is instead giving an existing judicial body additional authority. Private religious arbitration forums already exist outside the state court structure; the question raised by the new law is why the state’s own religious courts should now occupy that space.
That leaves the issue on which much of the public fight has turned: consent. On paper, the law is voluntary. In practice, critics argue, voluntariness may look very different in tightly knit communities marked by strong social hierarchies, economic dependence, and informal communal pressure. Even with some exclusions built into the law, they say, unequal bargaining power may shape the forum before the merits of a case are ever heard.
In that sense, the argument is not only about religion and state, but about whose freedom is likely to expand and whose may shrink. Supporters see the law as broadening the ability of religious Israelis to resolve disputes in a forum that reflects their values.
Critics counter that in communities where authority is communal and social pressure is strong, the weaker party may have little real choice at all. That is also where women’s rights advocates have concentrated their warnings.
Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the founding academic director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University, and the former vice-president of the UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), argued that formal consent cannot be cleanly separated from the social realities in which it is obtained.
In many civil disputes, she said, large disparities in bargaining power already exist, and civil law attempts to offset them through protections for weaker parties. Moving such disputes into a religious legal forum, she warned, risks strengthening the strong and weakening the weak.
Halperin-Kaddari also said the law should be understood not only as a religion-and-state dispute, but as a gendered institutional change. Rabbinical courts are an overwhelmingly male system in which women do not serve as judges, she noted, and expanding the jurisdiction of such a framework raises broader questions about equality, representation, and the kinds of rights protections litigants can realistically expect.
For now, the law’s defenders and opponents are speaking past one another. Supporters describe an optional forum for people who want their civil disputes heard under religious norms. Critics see the state lending new force and legitimacy to a religious forum that does not operate on the same assumptions or protections as the civil court system. The law’s real significance may therefore lie less in the abstract right to choose arbitration than in a more practical question: In communities where the weaker party is not always free to say no, who will truly be choosing?