Jews and Others: Non-Jewish Jews in IsraelAsher Cohen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan Israel. Bernard Susser is Paterson Professor of Politics, Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Immigration to Israel in the context of the Law of Return—the lynchpin of Zionist national policy— is known as aliya (going up) and the immigrants are called olim. There is a clearly positive ideological thrust to this nationalist term. Leaving the country, by contrast, is spoken as yerida (going down). A graphic sense of the ideological import of the yordim (those who leave the country) was provided by Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin who called them 'nefolet shel nemushot' (fallout of weaklings). 2. For a general analysis of the development of religious-secular conflict in Israel see Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser, Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity: The Secular Religious Impasse, Baltimore, MD and London, 2000. 3. Michael Korinaldi, 'The Law of Return: Collision Between Religion and Nation', in Mordechai Bar-On and Tzvi Tzameret (eds), Two Sides of the Bridge, Jerusalem, 2002 (Hebrew), p. 56. See also Korinaldi's comprehensive book The Riddle of Jewish Identity: The Law of Return, Theory and Practice, Jerusalem, 2001 (Hebrew). 4. From the letter of David Ben Gurion to the 'Sages of Israel' in regard to children of 'mixed marriages'—effectively, children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. Cited by Yitzchak Galnoor and Menachem Hoffnung (eds), The Government of Israel: A Source Book, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 205. 5. Eliezer Ben-Refael, Jewish Identities: The Answers of the Sages of Israel to Ben-Gurion, Sde Boker, 2001, pp. 45–52. 6. Supreme Court 62/72, Oswald Rufeisen v The Minister of Interior. The most important sections of the decision can be found in Yitzchak Galnoor and Menahem Hoffnung (eds), The Government of the State of Israel: A Book of Sources, pp. 218–20. 7. Supreme Court 68/58 Binyamin Shalit v The Minister of Interior. The most important sections of the decision can be found in Yitzchak Galnoor and Menahem Hoffnung (eds), The Government of the State of Israel, pp. 212–17. 8. The Law of Return 1950, reformulated in 1970, 586, p. 34. 9. Uri Gordon, 'And the Grandchildren Shall Return to Their Borders', Al Hamishmar 28 August, 1994, p. 9. 10. For a full treatment of the 'sociological conversion' phenomenon see Asher Cohen, Non-Jewish Jews in Israel, Tel Aviv, 2006. 11. Divrei Haknesset (The Knesset Protocol) 14th Knesset, meeting 232, 22 July 1998. 12. Moshe Sicron, Demography: Israel's Population—Characteristics and Trends, Jerusalem, 2004, p. 21 (Hebrew). 13. In an explanatory pamphlet entitled 'Setting a Border to the Conflict', Yuli Tamir, presently the Minister of Education and part of the dovish wing of the Labour Party, enumerates the hawkish boundary lines that were proposed in the past. She claims that were they accepted they would create a severe demographic problem while the 'greatest challenge is drawing a border that will protect a Jewish majority'. 14. One important testimony to the rise of the demographic issue is the renewed activity of the Council on Demography in the Ministry of Labour and Welfare. Arab human rights organizations such as Adallah and Musawa were highly critical of its activity and demanded that it be disbanded on the grounds that it encourages viewing the Arab population as a threat. See, Meirav Sarig, 'We Love You Birth-Mothers', Ha'aretz, 1 November 2002. 15. The Population Registry Law 1965, paragraph 2, Law Protocols, 466, 1965, p. 270. 16. Noah Levi Aivas, 'The Demographic Discourse in the Daily Hebrew Press 1989–2004', Master's thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2005, (Hebrew) pp. 29–38.