The Looming War Over Israel’s Law of Return

Soon after the right-religious bloc, led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, won a governing mandate in Israel’s elections last November, attention turned to the increasingly ambitious demands of the religious and ḥaredi parties that underpinned that victory. One of those demands was for the revocation of a key provision of Israel’s Law of Return, a provision known colloquially as the Grandchild Clause. The clause is perhaps the most familiar, to both Israelis and to foreigners, of any in Israeli law: it guarantees citizenship to anyone with a Jewish grandparent. Correspondingly, the demand to revoke it was controversial, drawing outcry from much of the Israeli public, including from part of the Likud party itself, and especially from American Jews and their representative organizations. For these reasons the proposal was dropped by the end of January of this year, and the government moved to focus instead on other issues, including judicial reform.

But the controversy over the Law of Return and the Grandchild Clause isn’t over. If anything, what happened last year may well be the opening skirmishes in a war that will last years if not decades. Indeed, there’s a good chance that the Grandchild Clause will one day be more controversial than the judicial reforms that nearly tore the country apart earlier this year, as well as more meaningful in what it reveals about Israeli society. It could even rival in its importance a number of other historically contentious issues in Israel, such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. This is no accident, since the Grandchild Clause is related to the core issue that has come to replace the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the most crucial fault line in Israeli politics, the issue that all other issues are organized around, issues of the deepest identity: who are we, and whose country is this? Both sides in the bitter controversy over Israel’s identity nominally subscribe to the slogan that theirs is a Jewish, democratic state. But there is little agreement on how this slogan should be filled with content. Moreover, the ideological convictions that fuel opposing attitudes to the Grandchild Clause are inextricably linked to political and demographic self-interest, of which both sides are increasingly conscious. This is the final ingredient needed for a ferocious culture war.

I. The Grandchild Clause and Its Beneficiaries