Smotrich officially rescinded it ostensibly to give the coalition a chance to consider it, but really the bill lacked support
By GIL HOFFMANReligious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich discusses the Law of Return(photo credit: KNESSET SPOKESPERSON/YEHONATAN SAMIYEH)
The sponsor of a controversial bill that would redefine who is allowed into Israel via the Law of Return, MK Bezalel Smotrich (Yamina), rescinded the bill and did not bring it to a vote, following a stormy debate at the Knesset on Wednesday.Since 1970, the law and its accompanying aliyah benefits have applied to anyone with a Jewish grandparent. One of the reasons was that the Nuremberg Laws of the Nazis were applied to anyone with a Jewish grandparent. Smotrich sought to change the law instead to apply only to anyone with a Jewish parent.By Orthodox Jewish law, only someone with a Jewish mother is considered halachicly Jewish. Smotrich said he wants to stop the law from applying to a grandchild of a Jew, as a step on the way to applying only to Jews according to Halacha, Jewish law.While Smotrich said the bill was supported by Israelis across the political and religious spectra, it was opposed by the governing coalition, Yisrael Beytenu, Yesh Atid and Meretz; Yamina leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked were not present, so it was unlikely to receive more than three votes out of 120. He officially rescinded it ostensibly to give the coalition a chance to consider it, but really the bill lacked support. Smotrich said it was wrong to give the Nazis the right to decide who is a Jew and to enable more assimilation in Israel resulting from non-Jews marrying people who are Jewish according to Jewish law. He said it was the right time to pass the bill, because Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman are not in the coalition.Lapid and Liberman both slammed Smotrich.“Who are you to decide who a Jew is?” asked opposition leader Yair Lapid, who accused Smotrich of ignoring biblical verses on treating immigrants well. “The grandchildren of Jews serve in the IDF and contribute more to the state than all your extremist rabbis together.”Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman said the bill would cause only rifts in the nation and should not have been allowed to be raised during the crisis over the novel coronavirus.Evgeny Sova, his colleague in Yisrael Beytenu, pointed out that thousands of Jews were murdered by the Smotrich River in Ukraine. He said that some of the survivors hid their Jewishness to stay alive, and now their grandchildren who want to return to their faith should not be prevented from doing so by Israel.“A fundamental principle in the 1948 return to our ancestral homeland, and echoing the vision, mission and values of a Jewish and democratic state, Israel’s Law of Return was enshrined as a means of ensuring that ‘never again’ would fulfill its prospective promise,” Blue and White MK Michal Cotler-Wunsch said. “To reevaluate this principle, without detailed statistics on who it would affect and its implications, is irresponsible and indicates the political nature of this proposal.“Due process and good governance are essential if the goal is indeed genuine discussion and reform,” she concluded.
