As coalition agreements are getting close to a conclusion, it seems quite clear where the next government is headed on some key matters. All non-Likud parties demanded a major change in the Law of Return: annulling the grandson clause. If this will change were to take place only a few decades ago, Israel would not be the same country as it is today.
When the Law of Return was first presented to the Knesset, it was meant to be the root of the Israeli immigration policy. It had a few technical clauses but one substantial one, which was also the first: “any Jew can ascend to the country,” and in other words, any Jew can make aliyah. The objective of the law was to maintain and preserve the identity of Israel, and so it did.
It was expanded 20 years after its passage in 1950 when the High Court discussed the matter of the Shalit family, which presented a unique case in which Major Benjamin Shalit requested to register his non-Jewish children as Jews based on their nationality. The direct consequence of this ruling was the expansion of the Law of Return, which from 1970 includes not only non-Jewish children of Jews but also non-Jewish spouses. This change in the Law of Return has made a negative impact on aliyah. If in the past aliyah helped the Jewish population, in the past 30 years it’s been on a slow but steady decrease. At the beginning of the ’90s, the Jewish majority in Israel was an overwhelming 83%, while now it’s lower than 74%. In three decades, Israel lost almost a 10th of its Jewish majority.
Contrary to what people may expect, the reason for the Jewish decrease in the percentage of the population is not because of an increase in the Arab population but the result of a steady stream of non-Jews coming into the country.
In a recent study conducted by the Knesset Research and Information Center, it was revealed that in 2020 only 28% of new olim from Russia were Jews. This wasn’t always the case. Until the mid-’90s the percent of Jews among new olim from Russia was over 70%.
To find where and how aliyah became a threat to the Jewish majority, the Israeli Immigration Policy Center requested information from the Population and Immigration Bureau about all the olim from all the world in the past 30 years. The results were fascinating. From 1990 to 2021, out of 215,000 olim, only 131,000 were Jews. That’s only a bit over 60%.
WHERE DID this gap come from? Statistics show that not only are former Russian olim are mainly non-Jewish, but also the vast majority of olim from other former Soviet countries are non-Jewish. In the past 30 years, only 36% of Russians who made aliyah were Jewish, from Ukraine 32%, Belarus 33%, Uzbekistan 35%, Moldova 33%, and so on.
What about other countries? From the United States, 21,000 people made aliyah in the past 30 years. Approximately 94%, 20,000, of them are Jewish. France – 95%, the United Kingdom – 94%. Even in South America the percentage of Jews is higher. Approximately 82% of olim who came from Brazil are Jewish, 88% from Argentina, 83% from Uruguay, and 81% from Colombia and Chile. In other words, the grandson clause is irrelevant to most of Diaspora Jewry.
No aliyah is 100% Jewish but in most cases, most people who take this courageous step do so out of a direct root to Israel. Meanwhile, no matter the causes of this situation, people from former Soviet-ruled countries use the legal loophole to make aliyah and by doing so they put a strain on a process that is meant to expand the Jewish majority, not harm it. The first to suffer from this phenomenon are former Soviet Jews who made aliyah and now are looked down at, with their Judaism questioned.
Annulling the grandchild clause entirely would be an indispensable measure in the face of this reality. Without fixing the problem of non-Jewish aliyah, the whole establishment of aliyah will be jeopardized. Desperate times call for drastic and creative measures. What is needed is a solution that will prevent the masses of non-Jews from coming as Olim, but also maintain the possibility of Jews who have non-Jewish spouses or children to come to the land of their forefathers without tearing their families apart.
With no Jewish majority, the Jewish identity of the state will be at risk, as well. Now is the time to change the tide.
The writer is in charge of government and media relations at the Israeli Immigration Policy Center.