In mid-September 1997, I arrived in Mexico City to launch another laborious free trade negotiation. I felt good about our strategy in the Ministry of Industry and Trade to open Israel economically through such agreements. I had picked up my predecessors’ negotiating pace and scale. Eventually, I launched and signed free trade agreements with Canada, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary. In November 1997, we would announce a three-way agreement with the United States for a free trade industrial zone in Jordan. Two decades later, it remains one of the rare surviving Israeli economic projects with the Arab world.
Whenever I traveled abroad, after the political meetings and business forums, I scheduled local Jewish community meetings, visiting Jewish day schools, Jewish community centers, and other Jewish institutions. Remembering how important Israel was to us in the Soviet Union, I was particularly proud to represent Israel to the world Jewish community. That was why I insisted in the coalition agreement that we add “Diaspora Affairs” to the title of the Interministerial Committee on Aliyah and Absorption I now chaired.
Israeli ministers usually travel with high-profile delegations, including many business leaders. While the Israelis who accompanied me often competed to join the more intimate political and economic meetings with officials, which might help open economic doors for them, most happily skipped the meetings with fellow Jews. When I visited the community centers and schools, they went to shop.
Whenever I invited them along, most waved off me with Israeli brashness: “Bah, what will I learn from these Jewish schools where they pretend to speak Hebrew? Why do I need to see nostalgic photos of Israel with camels and Jaffa oranges? If they really love us, let them make aliyah, and we’ll talk there.”
On this trip, some of my fellow travelers broke the usual Israeli boycott. Mexico City’s Jewish community is famous for being particularly colorful, blending a diverse mix of different Jewish ethnic groups.
This time, the boycott came from the other side. At our first event, a big community breakfast, my host reported that the leaders of Mexico’s Reform Jewish community would not be showing up, now or at any other time. Looking embarrassed, he delivered a letter from them. They explained that their movement was boycotting all ministers who voted for chok ha’amara, the conversion bill. This proposed law would guarantee the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly on conversions in Israel.
What? Boycotting me? Their voice in the Israeli government? Really? After all those demonstrations together? Didn’t they know where I stood on this issue? Why couldn’t they appreciate how hard I had fought to find a way to defend their institutions? At first stuck in this defensive reaction, I tried being dismissive, thinking sarcastically, “Well, there are so few Reform Jews in Mexico, maybe that’s their way of trying to be noticed.”
On second thought, my protective irony collapsed. In recent months, whether I was dealing with ministry, cabinet, Knesset, or party issues, the religion-state problem haunted us. On a deeper level, I kept wondering, “Is it possible for Israeli politicians to represent the interests of Diaspora Jews who don’t vote in Israel without betraying their obligation to the Israelis who do?”
As it worked out, just weeks before this Mexico trip, the conversion bill the Reform movement disliked had passed its first reading in the Knesset. The intense controversy surrounding the bill represented the latest round of the “who is a Jew” crisis, which continues to complicate Israel-Diaspora relations today.
The problem began even before the state of Israel’s creation. On June 19, 1947, eleven months before Israel became a state, David Ben-Gurion sent what became known as the “status quo letter” to representatives of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael movement. Ben-Gurion made certain defining promises, which he implemented as Israel’s first prime minister. Shabbat would be the national day of rest. All state institutions, including the army, would keep strictly kosher. Religious schools would be state funded but independent. And—perhaps the most restrictive commitment—Halachah, Jewish law, would dominate in personal realms such as marriage, divorce, and conversion.
Why did this secular Jew, this Socialist Zionist leader, make such sweeping, long-term concessions to ultra-Orthodox rabbis? Didn’t he realize it would handcuff the state? Ben-Gurion was a pragmatist. In June 1947, just two years after the Holocaust ended, he sought to unite the deeply scarred Jewish people behind the pressing need to establish a Jewish state.
Ben-Gurion chaired the Jewish Agency, the Jewish people’s proxy government in Palestine. A delegation from the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was arriving to explore options for the territory as it slid into civil war between Jews and Arabs, with the British mandatory authorities looking on helplessly.
Ben-Gurion was worried. If anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Jews told UNSCOP they opposed a Jewish state, it could derail the momentum building for Jewish statehood. With their black hats and long beards, the ultra-Orthodox looked like what most non-Jews imagined all Jews looked like. These “real Jews” seemed more representative of “the Jews” than Ben-Gurion and his clean-shaven, work-clothes-wearing, modern Zionists.
Approval from ultra-Orthodox Jews in Palestine would also convince the many skeptical Jews outside Palestine that there was a pro-Zionist consensus that recognized the pressing need for a Jewish state. So, ironically, one of the issues that divides Diaspora Jews from Israelis today started as an attempt to unite them!
Ben-Gurion cut a deal. He wrote a letter, which he never formalized into law. The ultra-Orthodox support helped in the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, authorized creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This exchange created the precedent: to secure ultra-Orthodox support for the State’s existence, Israel’s leaders made concessions on issues they considered less important.
Ben-Gurion was no mere tactician. This arrangement also advanced his strategic vision. Beyond creating and defending the state, he was building the New Jew, forging one identity out of many. Just as Israelis would speak one language, Hebrew, they would have one religious baseline, Orthodoxy. The “status quo letter” made the Orthodox shul the synagogue secular Israelis didn’t pray in.
Ben-Gurion also feared continuing the denominational fights he saw in America and Europe in his new Jewish state. “I see danger in a war against religion and in a war for religion,” Ben-Gurion admitted. His job was cultivating Israeliness, not creative forms of Jewishness.
As a politician, Ben-Gurion needed to satisfy his Orthodox minority, not America’s liberal majority. He noticed how few Reform Jews lived in Israel. There wasn’t a Reform temple in Israel until 1958. In 1970, when some young American Jews asked Ben-Gurion how Reform Judaism could establish itself in Israel, he offered a realpolitik answer: if Reform Judaism wanted recognition, three hundred thousand Reform Jews should move to Israel.
Ben-Gurion also assumed, incorrectly, that this bargain was temporary. He assumed Orthodox Jewry would melt away in the Jewish state, and even religious kids born in Israel would grow up to become New Jews—secularized pioneers like him.
In May 1948, the state was established, with Ben-Gurion as its first prime minister. The old-new Jewish state quickly justified itself by ingathering exiles, offering Jews a long-needed refuge from persecution. Continuing that mission, a foundational law passed in 1950, the Law of Return, proclaimed, “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an immigrant.”
Initially, the law did not define who a Jew was. It welcomed all Jews as citizens unless the immigration minister deemed the applicant to be “engaged in an activity directed against the Jewish people” or “likely to endanger public health or the security of the State.” Having been persecuted, exiled, wandering, homeless, Jews now had a home.
But determining who exactly is and is not a Jew became a bureaucratic question for immigration authorities. And while the Law of Return was vague, Ben-Gurion’s status quo letter was specific: follow Halachah. So, given the historic overlap between Jewish religious and national identities, separation between synagogue and state became impossible. A political, legal, and religious collision was inevitable.
In 1958, Ben-Gurion’s coalition teetered when he and his minister of the interior, Israel Bar-Yehuda, showed their true feelings about the “who is a Jew” question. Under orders of the former minister, Moshe Chaim Shapiro of the National Religious Party, Interior Ministry functionaries were demanding that immigrants prove they were Halachically Jewish. This offended Bar-Yehuda and Ben-Gurion. These secular, socialist revolutionaries wanted Israel to be as welcoming as possible to build the state.
The Bureau of the Registration of Inhabitants started issuing Israeli identity cards defining immigrants as Jews based on individuals’ “good faith” declarations that they were Jewish. Theoretically, if you called yourself Jewish, you could get citizenship.
This sweeping improvisation violated the status quo agreement. It weakened the Chief Rabbinate’s hold on the Interior Ministry in assessing an immigrant’s Jewishness. Two cabinet ministers from the NRP objected. They resigned, threatening Ben-Gurion’s coalition.
Ben-Gurion now faced a dilemma: risk losing religious support and his power, or risk alienating non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews. Seeking some cover, Ben-Gurion took an unprecedented step, which has never been repeated. Seeing himself as the leader of the Jewish people, he sent letters to forty-seven leading Jewish thinkers from around the world, asking how the state of Israel should define who is a Jew. The novelist S. Y. Agnon advised the prime minister to drop the question, because religion and state are like two neighbors who cannot move away from each other but make one another uncomfortable. Any attempt to mediate between the two would only cause trouble.
But there was no way to avoid this question. Even before the majority of the sages advised him to follow the one shared standard, Halachah, as the only way to unite Israelis, Ben-Gurion, the practical politician, had made up his mind. To continue the Zionist enterprise, he caved to the religious parties’ demands, granting them a monopoly on personal status issues. The NRP’s man, Moshe Chaim Shapiro, returned to the Ministry of Interior and restored his stricter definition of Jewishness. Every prime minister since has replicated Ben-Gurion’s bargain.
In this defining moment, Orthodox politicians showed they were ready to bring down the government over religious issues. And most non-Orthodox leaders showed they were equally ready to surrender.
The Knesset eventually updated the Law of Return twice because it was so vague. Amendments in 1970 fine-tuned the original rationale, which was that every Jew Hitler persecuted needed a home. The law defined Jews by the traditional standard: you had to be born to a Jewish mother or to have converted to Judaism. But it added that immigration would be open to anyone with a Jewish grandparent or their spouses—Hitler’s standard for targeting Jews in Germany.
By not specifying Orthodox conversions, the 1970 amendment infuriated the ultra-Orthodox. While the status quo only allowed Orthodox conversions in Israel, liberal conversions done in the Diaspora were now acceptable for Israeli citizenship.
Although Ben-Gurion’s commitment to uniting Israel divided the Jewish people, he kept much of this under the legal radar. Except for the constructively ambiguous Law of Return, these agreements emerged during coalition negotiations, at cabinet meetings, or within the ministry, not as laws passed in the Knesset.
Critics say Ben-Gurion created a built-in Jewish identity time bomb. I believe he understood the power of ambiguity. The Knesset never passed a law formally treating Orthodox and Reform as equal. That would have been unacceptable to some extremely influential Israelis. But the Knesset also never passed a law formally declaring the non-Orthodox unequal either. That would have alienated most Diaspora Jews.
Naturally, combatants turned to the Supreme Court. And the judges left no doubts: if the Knesset would not pass clear laws, the court would respond, making decisions unlikely to please the ultra-Orthodox parties.
The religious parties started to panic. To stop the court-driven drift toward more liberal standards, they demanded a law guaranteeing that in Israel only Orthodox conversions would be considered legitimate for citizenship. That is why it was called the conversion bill.
As Netanyahu formed his government in 1996, the religion and state fight had already hit a critical crossroads. The Supreme Court looked to the new government for clarity. The religious parties joined Bibi’s coalition only after he promised to pass a conversion bill. The bill would formalize a key aspect of the Ben-Gurion understanding by giving the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate a monopoly on conversion.
The anger was growing on both sides. The ultra-Orthodox parties considered any steps toward recognizing non-Orthodox conversions in Israel as a get, a bill of divorce, proof that the state no longer respected the status quo agreement. Many liberal Diaspora leaders considered any steps to delegitimize liberal conversions equally insulting, proof the state no longer respected them.
As the chairman of the Interministerial Committee on Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs, as the chairman of my party, and as a member of the cabinet, I needed a clear position. But, Agnon, the novelist, was right: the status quo worked best amid clouds of ambiguity. I concluded that if one side won, we would all lose—as one people united around Israel. I believed we had to keep this fight out of the Knesset and out of the Supreme Court. For this, we needed a compromise.
I hoped, naively, that my experience mediating among so many different players during the Soviet Jewry struggle would come in handy as a government minister. I kept remembering how easily we had overcome religious differences while marching on Washington.
I had visited Cleveland on one of the last weekends before the march. The chosen location for the communal dinner on Saturday night was the Reform temple, whose rabbis invited me to speak there Saturday morning. We faced two problems. Without a microphone, no one would hear me in the vast sanctuary, but I wouldn’t use a microphone on the Sabbath. And the temple’s kitchen was not kosher, but there were no other available halls big enough to hold the large crowd we expected.
Urged by an Orthodox friend, Morry Weiss, who mediated, I spoke standing beside the microphone, far away enough that I wasn’t quite using it, but close enough that people could hear. And, for the first time in its history, the temple koshered its kitchen to host the community. If we could make such compromises for the march in Washington, I wondered, what kinds of compromises would we make to continue our march through history together?
To compromise, one first has to talk to the other side. Not to agree, but at least to hear the other’s arguments and to try understanding your rival’s logic. I wanted to try out some of the less inflammatory Orthodox arguments in front of my hometown crowd, at a meeting with liberal Jewish leaders hosted by my friends at the New York Federation. Addressing the “Orthodox monopoly,” I said, “Obviously, there’s a problem here. But when they say that Halachah, Jewish law, kept our people together for thousands of years, and non-Orthodox movements don’t have such a long track record, aren’t they right at least in historical terms? The liberal movements have barely been around for two hundred years. When it comes to questions of keeping the Jewish people alive, even if we strongly disagree with some Orthodox policies, shouldn’t we give them the benefit of the doubt?”
The atmosphere in the room turned frosty. People looked agitated. They all seemed to be asking one question with their eyes: Et tu, Brute?
One Federation friend snapped, “Are you also with our enemies? This is the thanks we get for all our support for you? Now, as soon as you join the government, you betray us.”
I ended my attempt at diplomacy abruptly. I saw their pain. We were no longer joking about Russian atheists and American Reconstructionists, cooperating as KGB agents glared at us. People who had devoted their lives to Israel, and had been told that it represented them, now felt rejected by it. In such a fight, most people were too upset to start understanding the other side or see anything amusing in the situation.
This “you owe us” loyalty argument was always a nonstarter with me. The first people who tried it, shortly after I arrived in Israel, were Meir Kahane’s followers. In the late 1960s, the charismatic, fiery Kahane was one of the first American Jews to draw attention to Soviet Jews’ suffering, through his militant group the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Despite appreciating his foresight, I signed a letter, with a few other Refuseniks, at the height of our struggle, condemning his use of violence in New York against Soviet targets. The JDL’s tactics undermined our nonviolent moral struggle. Once we were both in Israel, I kept a disdainful distance from Kahane, his Kach Party, and his anti-Arab bigotry.
The Soviet Jewry movement included everybody from Kahanists on the right to French Communists on the left. How could I stand for anything as a politician, if I had to make all of them happy, all of the time?
By contrast, the followers of Rabbi Kook, led by Rabbi Tzvi Tau, never tried leveraging their unique role at the heart of Avital’s struggle to press me. They remained restrained despite the fact that they strongly supported the conversion bill. They fervently opposed Reform Judaism entering Israel and were very critical of my stance on this issue.
After my failed attempt with my liberal New York friends, I tried starting a dialogue from the other end. I invited ultra-Orthodox Knesset members to listen to non-Orthodox American Jews.
My party, Yisrael B’Aliyah, had cooperated with ultra-Orthodox parties on other issues. Together, we started breaking down some prejudices. The first success was in resolving the heartbreaking problem of mixed Russian Jewish families separated after death, because the Chevra Kadisha burial societies refused to bury those who were Halachically non-Jewish in Jewish cemeteries. This included some IDF veterans who had risked their lives defending the state. It had been a hot issue in our campaign.
When we joined the government, we insisted that the chief rabbis address this issue urgently. The chief Ashkenazi rabbi lectured us, claiming that the purity of cemeteries had kept the Jewish people alive for millennia. “Look at Europe,” he said. “It’s all cemeteries now, but everyone knows those cemeteries are Jewish because we kept them Jewish. You can’t start twisting Jewish law because of one person’s needs,” he concluded.
We kept pushing. Fortunately, Israel has two chief rabbis who rotate responsibilities. When the Sephardi chief rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron took charge, he embraced a different approach. Troubled by the families’ misery, he found a solution in the rabbinic concept of darchei shalom, paths to peace in society. Slight, not-very-noticeable barriers could hive off an area in each cemetery, he explained. That would create a section where anyone could be buried, ever so subtly.
Rabbi Bakshi-Doron directed the burial societies to respect each family’s wishes, accommodating anyone who wanted the Kaddish, the traditional mourning prayer, said or any other rituals followed. The rabbi’s expansiveness solved this emotionally charged problem.
“Can I convert to Sephardi?” I asked. “They seem to have more fun.” They eat kitniyot—legumes like corn and peanuts—on Passover, making the holiday’s food restrictions more manageable, and their rabbis are more understanding. More seriously, I wondered if the flexibility in Sephardic communities explained why no Reform movement emerged there. The rabbis’ openness might have prevented the rebellions that Ashkenazi rigidity fueled.
Similarly, we defied the conventional wisdom that claimed ultra-Orthodox Jews had no interest in regular jobs. A leading Agudat politician, Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, approached me with a proposal to create special professional courses for ultra-Orthodox Jews, concentrating on skills such as accounting and computing. Our ministry, together with the Jerusalem College of Technology, piloted a series of such programs, understanding that Israel needed more yeshiva students to become productive citizens. Today, more than ten thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews are graduating from vocational or academic programs annually, and the numbers keep growing.
At the same time, ultra-Orthodox politicians helped us secure mass budgetary commitments for housing initiatives for new immigrants. Overall, I found the ultra-Orthodox much more flexible than I expected, even on religious matters.
I started wondering, could we leverage this goodwill and encourage a dialogue between these ultra-Orthodox politicians and representatives of the liberal movements? I was hosting a delegation of American Jewish leaders at the Knesset. Two of the leaders represented the Reform movement. I invited a number of members from various parties to discuss the conversion bill.
The ultra-Orthodox politicians’ first reaction was, “No, we cannot meet with them.” Trying to speak their language, knowing that the way I framed it would have insulted the Reform Jews if leaked to reporters, I told the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians, “They’re Jews like us. They are part of our people by the most Orthodox standards. If you don’t consider them rabbis, can’t you see them as community leaders? And if you don’t see their temple as a synagogue, can’t you see it as a Jewish community center? Don’t we in Israel have to speak to all the Jews of the world?”
Two ultra-Orthodox politicians grudgingly agreed to participate. They were ready to listen as long as there would be no direct interaction with the delegation. The session was off-the-record, with no photographers or stenographers allowed. These ultra-Orthodox politicians couldn’t be seen meeting “the Reformim.”
We started smoothly. But after ten minutes, one visitor made some political calculations. Noting that the Israelis I invited included clean-shaven secular members of the Knesset as well as bearded Orthodox ones, and confident he would have a pro-liberal majority, one American Jew proposed, informally, American style, “Hey, let’s just start by taking a quick vote on this conversion question.”
I thought, mistakenly, “Why not?”
That ended it. The ultra-Orthodox politicians walked out. They accused me of violating our agreement. Politely showing up was one thing. But they could not afford to have the ultra-Orthodox newspapers exposing their active involvement in such meetings.
The Reformers wouldn’t listen to arguments. The ultra-Orthodox wouldn’t sit with Reformers. But what about the silent Israeli majority? All the religious parties combined averaged between 15 and 20 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, most non-Orthodox Israeli politicians stood on the same ideological quicksand. These kinds of issues were not important enough to them or their voters to bring down the coalition whenever they were in power.
Only when they were on the outs did they suddenly start caring about their Diaspora brethren. As a result, we all sank into this strange position of passively allowing the conflict to grow.
Being a part of this impasse frustrated me. I felt torn between what my constituents expected me to do—stay in the government—and what my Diaspora friends expected me to do—walk, or at least threaten to leave. Ariel Sharon, who had been in the Knesset since 1977, felt badly for me.
I had the best seat at my first cabinet table. On one side was Yuli Edelstein: my old comrade in arms, a fellow prisoner of Zion, and one of my Yisrael B’Aliyah Party cofounders. Sitting on my other side was the former major general Ariel Sharon, serving as minister of national infrastructure.
For us Soviet Jews, Sharon was the 1973 Yom Kippur War’s great hero. His counterattack in the Sinai turned Israel’s certain defeat into a historic victory, humiliating the Soviets along with their Arab clients. This turnabout shut down the taunts of all those who were tailing us young Moscow activists. That made Sharon the man who made the KGB cringe, right when I was starting to learn about Israel.
My perceptions of Sharon soured during Israel’s first Lebanon War in 1982. At the time I was in the middle of my hunger strike, so I only heard bits of propaganda. Still, the Soviets kept calling Sharon the “butcher.” They blamed him for the massacres Christian Phalangists had committed against Palestinians in camps Israeli troops controlled, Sabra and Shatila. While I knew how distorted Soviet news was, Sharon’s moral failure embarrassed me. Israel’s internal Kahan Commission would conclude that Sharon, while not guilty of murder, bore responsibility for “not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed.”
When I landed in Israel in 1986, Sharon welcomed me along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. Even on that euphoric day, I had mixed feelings about him as he hugged me. When Sharon invited me to visit his massive ranch in the Negev, I hesitated.
Over the years, I learned about Arik’s efforts to help free me and other Soviet Jews. Then, when the big aliyah came, he lived up to his loving nickname, the Bulldozer. As the head of the Zionist Forum for Soviet Jewry, I discovered that what could take months of political wrangling with other ministries, Arik often solved in one meeting, sometimes in five minutes. He plowed through bureaucratic obstacles to get thousands of caravans for immigrants and provide essential discounts for contractors to start building permanent houses. It seemed that nothing could stop him.
After Yisrael B’Aliyah’s electoral victory, Sharon greeted us warmly, saying he appreciated that Russian immigrants finally had a voice. Arik won us over the first time Yuli and I started strategizing at the cabinet table, in what we thought was secret, speaking Russian. “Um, guys,” he warned us. “I just want you to know that I understand Russian.” It was his parents’ mother tongue.
This master politician proved to be a generous mentor. He spent a day with Yisrael B’Aliyah’s activists, shepherding us around the territories past the Green Line, Israel’s 1949 borders. He knew the history of every community, the geography, industry, and agronomy of every region, the military dynamics of every sector. He kept waving maps around as props. We found them helpful, but we noticed that he never needed to glance at them. It was all in his head.
Arik was committed to helping the immigrants integrate. He attended our interministerial committee meetings regularly. He often was the only other minister who showed up, besides Yuli and me. He offered us advice, ranging from how to manage the government bureaucracy to how to maneuver in the Knesset. Seeing how troubled I was by the “who is a Jew” and conversion bill questions, Sharon invited me out for a coffee. Today, we would call it coaching.
“Natan, you know I want you to succeed,” he said. “I think I am even more liberal than you are on the question of who is a Jew. Any individual who wants to be with us, who could be a good soldier, or who suffers for being connected to us is a Jew and should be welcomed here. But,” he added, “if you want to be a successful politician, first, you have to deliver to the people who sent you here, your voters. You also have to broaden your outreach to voters who didn’t vote for you this time—but might next time. Don’t forget, even the best of the Diaspora Jews are not voting here. They won’t help you.”
Then, Arik added the kicker: “I was with you on every meeting about housing. You and Yuli just pulled off a great coup by getting that big housing initiative, which is so important for immigrants. But you couldn’t have done it without Meir Porush,” the minister from the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael. “These people also cooperated when you needed to solve the cemetery problem. They helped you on an issue important to you and your electorate. Now these people are asking you about something important to them and their electorate, the conversion issue. If you let them down on this issue key to their constituents, you won’t get their support on issues important to your constituents. Besides,” Arik finished, “you have to understand. We aren’t compromising with the KGB here. We are making compromises among Israelis to build Israel together.”
There it was: the instruction manual to every political souk. I no longer had the dissident’s purity. I had to be a politician.
Arik often mentioned the KGB in our conversations, just as Ehud Barak would often mention the tsinok, my punishment cell, when I served in his government. These references usually were the Israeli warriors’ way of looking past our out-of-shape bodies and pale faces, hailing us as fellow fighters, Zionist heroes who were not just mere party hacks.
This time, in mentioning the KGB, Arik meant something different: It’s time to leave your idealistic utopia, the fight between good and evil. You’re not a Refusenik in Israel; you’re a leader. Become a politician.
Successful politicians—David Ben-Gurion, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu—never felt they were betraying anyone or anything, as long as they were broadening their base and gaining power. They defined the politician’s mission as using power to build the country. To succeed in politics, you have to see compromising in a messy, even morally fraught, situation as a necessary step in solidifying your standing, so you can wield power for the common good more effectively.
Dissidents, however, think about their activity in terms of struggle and betrayal. A moral campaign is zero-sum. Compromise is the tool of the regime to seduce and divide. When a dissident’s struggle ends in victory, this contempt for compromisers often continues. Some dissidents, still stuck in their black-and-white world, end up seeing every opponent as wicked. My fellow dissidents usually ended up hating politics.
In my dissident activity and in my years in prison, I became friendly with a number of people who, after the Soviet Union collapsed, would serve in the parliaments of Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Armenia. Like me, many went to prison first. None of them lasted more than one term in parliament. All of them quickly became miserable—and made their colleagues miserable too. They had been such valuable political assets during the first election, representing the fresh start. But it all quickly soured: everyone soon realized that politicians require the talent of compromise, which they lacked.
The most successful dissident turned politician I knew was Václav Havel. But his extraordinary popularity made him president of Czechoslovakia, then of the Czech Republic, both honorary positions. Havel confessed to me that he could never be a prime minister. He had no appetite for political messiness; the daily political battles and cease-fires were not for him.
Sharon’s statement was axiomatic for every politician. These are the rules of the democratic political game: your voters grant you the power. But his advice only reminded me that I was not a good politician. I could not divorce my political career from my struggle in the Soviet Union and the commitments I had happily made there. I entered the Knesset because so many people back then felt connected to our cause, our people, and our homeland.
I survived in the Gulag by feeling this grand sense of unity. As a politician, I couldn’t pretend that preserving those connections was not my responsibility. When responding to some specific demands of Diaspora Jews, I could answer, “Thanks for your input, but you are not citizens of Israel.” But when it came to nurturing their fundamental connection to the place and the state, I represented them as well. Israel belongs to all the Jews, wherever they live. That was Israel’s founding mission. That’s the idea behind the Law of Return. And I felt that was my mission too.
Resignation was always an option. But after winning the voters’ trust, resigning and removing my party from the coalition would be serious acts. I would only take that plunge if my conscience no longer allowed me to serve or if my resignation could create new political realities. My understanding in 1997, that the conversion bill question wasn’t black and white, kept me negotiating within the government. At the same time, I wondered, “Would a different government have a better chance of reaching compromise?”
The answer was no. Taking down our Likud-led coalition would have had no impact on this religion-state issue. To the contrary, the Labor Party’s history suggested they would cut the same deals with the ultra-Orthodox.
David Ben-Gurion’s tradition continued. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin had given the ultra-Orthodox more power than before. He needed their backing to advance his negotiations with Syria’s dictator Hafez al-Assad about possibly returning the Golan and to pass the Oslo Accords. Both leading secular parties were always ready to sacrifice what they considered to be secondary worries about state and religion to mobilize support for their primary concern. For Labor, it became guaranteeing Israel’s security by advancing the peace process; for Likud, it became achieving peace by resisting pressure for one-sided concessions while keeping Israel’s historic and biblical lands.
Facing such a deadlock, I could do little except rely on a classic parliamentary maneuver. Proposals only become laws if they pass three readings in the Knesset. A standard political tool for buying time was to agree to vote for a bill on its first reading, thereby fulfilling your obligation to the coalition agreement you signed. But then you insist the proposed law go to a special committee for revision, because you will not vote in subsequent readings to pass the law without an acceptable compromise.
As a result, shortly before my Mexico City trip, when the conversion bill had its first reading in the Knesset, my party colleagues and I voted aye. Following this Israeli political tradition, we let it be known we would not vote for the bill a second time, or allow it to pass, without the compromises we sought.
This strategy was too sophisticated for most Israeli voters to grasp, let alone Diaspora Jews. The pre-vote shouting continued after the vote too. That was how I found myself in Mexico City, facing the ultimately short-lived Reform boycott.
Of course, as soon as you finish the first reading, the clock starts ticking toward the second one. How could we possibly achieve a compromise? Despite the hullabaloo around the conversion bill, only a handful of us in government cared about the issue enough to try finding a compromise. In addition to Yuli and me, the only politicians really engaged were Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, Michael Eitan of the Likud, and Alexander Lubotsky of the Third Way.
After the bill passed its first reading, the prime minister formed a committee of experts to seek a compromise. It would not be easy mediating between two sides that could barely sit in the same room together.
On June 27, 1997, Bibi turned to his finance minister, Ya’akov Ne’eman, to chair the committee. One of Israel’s first superlawyers, Ne’eman had already served as justice minister—and, on another level, as my first lawyer in Israel. The well-respected Ne’eman was skilled at finding Maimonides’s golden path of moderation toward compromise.
The commission held fifty meetings, hearing the testimony of nearly eighty witnesses. After most committee sessions, we politicians would meet to brainstorm, seeking “a consensual solution.” But we kept hitting the same ideological deadlock. Trying to solve this problem in the abstract, it became zero-sum. Either the ultra-Orthodox would win by cementing their monopoly over religious practices, or the liberal denominations would win by gaining some legitimacy.
My friend Irina “Ira” Dashevsky’s testimony broke the logjam. Ira and her father, Dr. Zeev Dashevsky, led Machanaim, an organization founded in Moscow in 1979 for kiruv, to bring Soviet Jews closer to Judaism. By the 1990s, Machanaim was in Israel, helping the many Russian immigrants who arrived without proper documents proving they were Jewish. Machanaim also offered conversion classes for Russian immigrants who were not Halachically Jewish, yet wished to convert.
Ignoring the legal technicalities, Dashevsky gave the big-picture sociological realities with her characteristically human touch. She asked, “What do you do with so many immigrants from the Soviet Union, accepted under the Law of Return, studying, fighting, working in Israel but ultimately rejected by the society, unable to marry, blocked from burial in a Jewish cemetery?” She wondered how creating so many second-class citizens would affect Israel’s future. She pointed out how unfair it was that, after they decided to join the Jewish family, after the Jewish state admitted them, the Jewish religion rejected them.
Dashevsky emphasized another anomaly that surprised many liberal Jews. Most Russian immigrants who wanted to convert wanted an Orthodox conversion. They didn’t care about Jewish theology. But only the Orthodox could provide what these immigrants sought: a conversion all of Israeli society accepted.
She proposed more generous readings of immigrants’ documents to welcome them as Jews. She also suggested a more liberalized conversion process, especially for minors, whom the rabbis might accept more easily.
I don’t know whether Ira’s sweeping picture of the problem was as eye-opening for Ne’eman as he claimed. Perhaps, as a good lawyer, he knew how to convince his clients to replace unrealistic expectations with more practical ones. But Ne’eman seized the moment. He redefined the committee’s aim as solving the “difficult humanitarian problem” of integrating masses of non-Halachic Russian Jews. Rising to this historic challenge, and not wanting to be blamed for abandoning the immigrants Israel had fought so hard to free, most hard-liners softened.
In January 1998, the Ne’eman Committee recommended a more open, multidenominational approach. The commission proposed creating an institute for Jewish studies to help the immigrants “integrate totally into Israeli-Jewish society.” Classes for conversion would be available and taught by teachers from all the streams, including Reform and Conservative Jewry.
Echoing Ben-Gurion, the commission also endorsed a “unified governmental conversion procedure—according to the Law of Torah—that will be recognized by all of Israel” and would “ensure the unity of the Jewish people.” Quoting the Jewish scholar Maimonides, the final report advised that the rabbis should “not be strict” with the convert. Use only “soft and acceptable words.”
The compromise was intended to end the battles in the Knesset and the Supreme Court, at least temporarily. Each side won some concessions. Orthodox conversion practices continued to dominate. But the non-Orthodox denominations gained legitimacy as part of the educational process, and a formal law granting the Orthodox rabbis a monopoly on conversion was avoided. The representatives of both the Chief Rabbinate and the liberal streams were unenthusiastic yet willing to cooperate, in their way. Eighty members endorsed the compromise in the Knesset.
When he announced the compromise in the Knesset, Ne’eman generously said two “best men” were walking “this bride”—the compromise—down the aisle, Likud’s Michael Eitan and me. The agreement suggested there was hope for compromise and some grand resolution to these ongoing headaches. But the Chief Rabbinate would continue trying to undermine the compromise and disrespecting the liberal streams, while Reform and Conservative Jews would continue campaigning for equality.
This conversion crisis showcased the depth of the growing tension between Israel and the Diaspora. The sides were not ready to listen to one another, let alone talk to one another. The Titanic joke no longer worked: we had stopped arguing strenuously with one another, which had long been our best guarantee to survive future catastrophes.
The Ne’eman Committee’s compromise bought us some time. The great clash ended up being postponed about twelve years. It was essential that, by the inevitable next crisis, we had improved our communication channels. But when the crisis returned, the channels of communication were still dysfunctional. By then, I would confront the question from a different perspective, representing the Diaspora while chairing the Jewish Agency for Israel.