ocschwar🇮🇱🇺🇲🇺🇦🦞 🇵🇸

This is not true. The truth is stranger and more interesting. Israel still runs its marriage laws according to the Ottoman Empire’s millet system, in which minority communities self-govern through officially recognized religious bodies. So does Lebanon, by the way. So do other parts of the Middle East. With differences in each place and some changes over time, it’s still fundamentally the old Ottoman way of doing things. So the only fully recognized state-approved marriage is thus religious marriage controlled by religious conservatives. And since Jewish religious law doesn’t allow it, Jews can’t marry non-Jews in the official rabbinate. But here’s where it gets weird: Muslim sharia courts in Israel, also funded and appointed by the state, *can* marry Jews and Muslims - as long as the Muslim is the man. Why? For the same Ottoman logic: because Muslim religious law allows Muslim men (but only men) to marry Jewish or Christian women. There are also Catholic canon law courts, Druze religious courts, etc. Each community has one. The Ottoman millet system. Why does this system survive, especially given polls that does that most Israelis don’t want this system? Two reasons. 1. We can’t agree on what would replace it. It’s part of our larger secular-religious culture war. 2. We don’t actually live in this system unless we want to. Because alongside this most restrictive of marriage laws in the free world, another less formal system operates, available to all, accepting of all, including LGBT and interfaith and every combination thereof. That second system is called “yeduim betzibur” in Hebrew, or “known in public.” It’s essentially what Westerners would call common-law marriage. And it’s comprehensive, granting a broad cross-section of marriage rights, including to interfaith and same-sex couples, since the 1990s. For example, inheritance, end-of-life decisions for each other, adopting kids together. Until 2014, when gay marriage became universal in America, Israel was ahead of most of America in terms of specific rights granted to gays - i.e., the most illiberal *formal* marriage law system in the free world sat atop one the most liberal *de facto* marriage law system in the free world. As I said, strange and interesting. The current speaker of the Knesset, for example, a powerful conservative politician from Likud, is a married gay man with kids. This year, because of the war, same-sex partners of soldiers hurt or killed in the war became officially recognized partners for the purposes of military stipends. My wife and I, two children of rabbis, don’t like the religious rabbinate system, so we married outside it. But we’re still married in the eyes of the state and of everyone we know, including Haredi friends who were at our wedding. Nobody bats an eyelash when you marry outside the official system. The gap between the old formal system and the lived reality is profound. Finally, there’s a third option: Marrying abroad. It’s a 45-minute plane ride to Cyprus, which does a brisk business marrying Israelis at Larnaca city hall. Israel is obligated by international treaties to recognize those marriages. And sitting next to those Israelis in the waiting room? Lebanese couples who are there for the same reason. When anti-Israel people go after us on questions like this - on those places where we don’t fit the Western liberal norm - it’s nearly always for things that reflect our deep cultural roots in the Middle East. We’re a complicated and sometimes tense mixture of two civilizational worlds. Literally. Half of Israeli Jews hail from Europe, half from Islamic lands. It makes more sense on these kinds of social questions to think of us as a less dysfunctional Lebanon than as a darker-skinned Switzerland. If, as Saturday Night Live wants you to believe, the Arab Middle East will soon turn gay-friendly if everyone “stops bombing us,” that liberal Arabness will look like Israel.