Today's Yediot Ahronot Web site reports that the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger, will convene a meeting tomorrow to discuss the issue of civil marriage. This is intended to pave the way for a coalition government behind prime-minister-delegate Binyamin Netanyahu that will consist of both the religious parties, who have previously painted the civil marriage issue as non-negotiable, and Yisrael Beiteinu's Avigdor Lieberman, whose party's impressive third-place showing in the February 10 election was in large part due to promises to reform the marriage process in Israel.
If the question comes to mind why Israel lacks civil marriage, it is based in the foundation of the state itself. Israel's George Washington, David Ben-Gurion, enacted the so-called status quo agreement with the largely non-Zionist Orthodox Jews of both Palestine and the world to get their support for a secular Jewish state by promising Orthodox Jewish dominion over aspects of secular life, including marriage.
The way it's played out over the past sixty years is essentially thus: Jewish couples seeking to marry in the State of Israel can only be married by an Orthodox rabbi, because, as part of the status quo agreement, only Orthodox rabbis are even recognized as being rabbis. Since Orthodox Jews adhere strictly to Jewish Law, Jewish couples can only marry in the two weeks between the end of the week following the woman's menstrual cycle and the onset of her next period. (For real.) They cannot marry on the sabbath. They cannot marry between Passover and Shavuot, except on the thirty-third day of that fifty-day period, and even then only if it doesn't fall on the sabbath. This is why a very large number of the secular Jews who make up the Israeli majority choose to marry outside of Israel. Cyprus, because it's close and cheap to travel to, is a frequent destination, because marriages enacted outside of Israel are recognized by the State.
Oh, and if you're Jewish and want to marry a non-Jew? Forget it. Won't happen in Israel. Many uninformed people have stated that because rabbis can't and won't marry Jews to non-Jews inside Israel, Israel has Nuremberg-style laws that prevent Jews and Arabs from marrying, but it doesn't. Priests and imams have the right to perform marriages in Israel, and they can and do perform marriages of Jews to non-Jews. Because Orthodox Judaism disallows intermarriage, rabbis won't marry Jews to non-Jews. If this seems "racist," bear in mind that an imam won't marry a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man (though a Muslim man marrying a Jewish woman is fine, provided the children are raised Muslim), and the Greek Orthodox church, which represents a substantial portion of Palestinian Christians, won't perform intermarriages, even with other Christian denominations.
Parties representing the interests of Orthodox Jews won about one-sixth of the seats in the current Knesset. So why are these people having such a profound effect on the government-formation process of Bibi? Because of Lieberman's support of civil marriage, there has been much posturing by parties such as the Sephardi-Orthodox Shas Party that they will not sit in a government with Lieberman's party. And the rub here is that Bibi needs all these parties, religious and secular, to agree to a coalition or he will fail in forming a government.
Shas has indicated that it is willing to "compromise" on the secular marriage issue and the meeting of Ashkenazi rabbis to take place tomorrow indicates that some deal will be struck by which civil marriage of non-Jews will be allowed by the incoming government. This is an enormous win for Lieberman, because it his constituency that represents the largest number of Israeli citizens who are either married to non-Jews, are raising children whom Jewish Law does not consider to be Jewish, or both. So while it won't be a complete shattering of the status quo agreement on marriage, it will be a victory for Lieberman.
All this really shows how for sale the mandates of the religious parties actually are. For all their black-hat wearing and davening, they will sell their faith down the river not to sit in the opposition. Sure, they'll make sure Lieberman doesn't have delicatessens serving pork operating in Mea Shearim, but they will have compromised on a key issue, and for a group that claims consistently that Jewish Law is immutable, this will be a hard one to explain.
Not that I think civil marriage shouldn't be legal in Israel. I very much do. I just wish it weren't Lieberman championing the cause. And, because I am a person of faith, I don't like the parties claiming to represent the classical version of my faith compromising their principles. But, in the end, all it really shows is that politicians are politicians, and that in any country, they are always for sale.