religious community, a remnant of antiquity which still speaks an Aramaic dialect).
On the main point, the judges said that the High Court-dealing generally with administrative matters-is not equipped to rule on such a profound question. It advised the petitioners to apply to the District Court, where a wide discussion is possible and expert witnesses can be called. The petitioners accepted this advice, and so the battle will be transferred to another judicial forum that will have to devote to it many hearings.
Why does the Israeli government refuse to recognize the Israeli nation? According to the official doctrine, there exists a "Jewish" nation, and the state belongs to it. After all, it is a "Jewish state," or, in the words of one of the laws, "the state of the Jewish people."
According to the same doctrine, it is also a democratic state, and all its citizens are supposed to be equal, irrespective of their national affinity. But basically the state is "Jewish."
According to this doctrine, Jewry is both a nation and a religion. In the first years of Israel, it was still the rule that if people who declared, bona fide, that they were Jews, they were registered as such. But when the religious camp attained more power, the law was amended and from then on people were registered as Jews only if their mothers were Jewish or if they had converted to the Jewish faith and not adopted another religion. This is, of course, a purely religious definition (according to Jewish religious law, a person is Jewish if his or her mother is; the father is irrelevant in this context).
This situation has created another problem. In Israel, the orthodox rabbinate enjoys a monopoly on Jewish religious affairs. Two other Jewish religious factions that are very important in the United States, Conservative and Reform, are discriminated against in Israel and conversions conducted by them are not recognized by the government. Some years ago, the High Court decided that persons converted to Judaism in Israel by these two communities must also be registered under "Nation: Jewish." Whereupon the Interior Minister at that time, a religious politician, peremptorily decreed that all future identity cards will show, under the item "nation," only five stars. But in the Ministry's "registry of inhabitants," it still says "Nation: Jewish."
The roots of the confusion go back to the beginnings of the Zionist Movement. Until then, Jews throughout the world were a religious-ethnic community. This was abnormal in contemporary
Europe, but quite normal 2000 years ago, when such communitiesHellenic, Jewish, Christian, and many more-were the norm. Each was autonomous in the Byzantine Empire and had its own laws and