Six days since his surprise flight on Shabbat to Moscow, full details have yet to emerge from Naftali Bennett’s three-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin. Officials in Jerusalem have been keeping tight-lipped. To make matters even more opaque, there are also no details of the almost daily phone-calls between Mr Bennett and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, or follow-up calls with Mr Putin.
Israeli sources have been intentionally downplaying expectations, saying that Mr Bennett isn’t in a position to dictate terms to either side. At most, he is trying to serve as a trusted channel for relaying messages. Though it isn’t entirely clear why the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, who have had representatives meeting each other in recent days, need another channel. What is certain at this point is that the trip to Moscow — derided, certainly from the pro-Netanyahu opposition, as a publicity stunt — is being taken seriously in Moscow and Kyiv, and is being coordinated with the leaders of Germany and France, who have also spent time talking with Mr Bennett on the phone this week. It has also been publicly acknowledged and endorsed by the Biden administration.
Mr Bennett is one of the only western allies who can get a hearing from Mr Putin. Some argue that it is meaningless, as the Russian leader is determined to snuff out Ukrainian independence and there’s no point in humouring him. But there’s an opposing view gathering support in Jerusalem. “Even if Bennett can’t bring peace or a ceasefire, he’s created a crucial channel of communications to Putin that can be used by others,” says an Israeli diplomat. “At the very least, this channel can be pass on requests to allow civilians out of the warzone.”
Plans in the pipeline
On a normal week, Wednesday’s visit of President Isaac Herzog to Ankara to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — ending over a decade of hostile relations — would be the main topic of this column. That will have to wait, but it’s worth mentioning briefly that the prickly Erdogan is another of the handful of leaders who are connected both to the west. Turkey is a Nato member, and has links to Moscow. Mr Erdogan also spoke with Mr Putin on the phone on Sunday, though nothing apparently came of it. Turkey controls the strategic Bosphorus Strait, the entry to the Black Sea, on which Russia and Ukraine have coastlines. Ankara also supplies Ukraine with drones that have been destroying Russian tanks.
Herzog’s visit has been on the cards for months , but events in Ukraine have added a new urgency. Turkey and Israel once planned to jointly build a pipeline that would transport oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan, via Turkey’s port of Ceyhan. Israel’s discovery of its own offshore gas-fields and the diplomatic crisis between Jerusalem and Ankara shelved those plans but with Europe now trying to wean itself off Russian gas, it may be time to renew them. Another matter of concern to Mr Putin.
While Prime Minister Bennett has been dealing with diplomacy, his ministers have been squabbling over how to deal with an influx of Ukrainian refugees. Since Russia’s invasion began, Israel has changed its policy three times. At first, it was prepared only to fast-track those who could prove their eligibility to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, while those who could not, or just weren’t eligible, were kept out. Then, they allowed refugees who had relatives in Israel to arrive on tourist visas, so long as they made a 10,000 shekel deposit on arrival. Finally, on Tuesday, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, the most steadfast in cabinet against allowing refugees to arrive, set a quota of 25,000 Ukrainian citizens who could enter and the deposit was waived.
The number is misleading. It includes 20,000 Ukrainians who are already in Israel, but their visas have expired. The government will not try to deport them for now. It also includes 2,000 refugees who have already arrived since the war began. So in real terms, for now Israel is allowing in another 3,000. That doesn’t include the thousands of Ukrainians of Jewish ancestry expected to emigrate under the Law of Return. But they will be facing other challenges upon arrival.
Conversion Conundrum
One thing about the war that can be said without a doubt is that it will boost emigration to Israel in the coming year from both countries. In the past two weeks, 2,000 new olim already arrived. The government and Jewish organisations involved in emigration have wildly differing assessments of the numbers to expect, with some ranging as high as 100,000. One official in a Jewish organisation commented this week that “most of them, while eligible under the Law of Return, will not be halachically Jewish”. In fact, that has been the case now for years with immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. While about two-thirds of the immigrants in the big wave in the early 1990s, which surpassed a million, were the children of Jewish mothers, and therefore regarded as halachically Jewish by the Orthodox rabbinate, that proportion has steadily declined over the years.
There are around 400,000 Israeli citizens who fall under the “without religion,” category. Nearly all are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from the former Soviet Union. With the new wave of refugees expected to arrive, that number will swell.
Two weeks ago, I interviewed in this column Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana, who is pushing legislation designed to streamline the giyur (conversion) process to encourage more of these Israelis “without religion” to enter the Orthodox system. At the time of the interview, the cabinet’s Legislative Affairs Committee had just voted in favour of passing the new law on to the Knesset, where Mr Kahana hoped he would have a majority.
But this week, as the Knesset ended its winter session with a flurry of legislation, the conversion law was pulled.
It lacked the support of the entire coalition and must wait. There are several ironies to this. The first is that the law is arguably needed now more than ever. Another is that the coalition “defectors” threatening not to vote in favour were from the Islamist party, Ra’am. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, explained this week that strictly Orthodox rabbis had contacted a number of sheikhs affiliated with his party, beseeching them not to support the law. Mr Abbas now insists that it would be wrong for a Muslim party to involve itself with legislation concerning only Jewish citizens. For now, Ra’am’s four MKs are abstaining, and without them there’s no majority, unless the six Joint List MKs in opposition also abstain. But that will take time and can only happen in the Knesset’s summer session.
But the greatest irony is that the opposition to Mr Kahana’s law, which is being marshalled by the strictly Orthodox parties, is self-defeating if they are ultimately successful. They fear that the law that is designed to empower local rabbis will weaken the grip of the Chief Rabbinate and set more lax conditions for converting.
However, under the law, giyur is to remain steadfastly Orthodox, even if more moderately so. Without a more streamlined and user-friendly conversion process, the number of Israelis who consider themselves Jewish, even though the Rabbinate and Orthodox Halacha does not, will continue to grow. With them, the number of Israelis who cannot understand why their fellow citizens, who are of Jewish ancestry, speak in Hebrew, serve in the IDF and pay their taxes, should not be considered Jewish. There are other definitions of Jewishness, not all of them Orthodox. If the strictly Orthodox intransigence continues, they may soon seem preferable to a majority of Israelis.
