Citizens to take an oath of loyalty to Israel

The Israel Democracy Institute’s latest Democracy Index reports that 54 percent of Israelis favour requiring citizens to take an oath of loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” as a condition for being allowed to vote. This bad idea should be opposed on principled and pragmatic grounds alike.

Of the approximately 7.23 million Israelis in 2009, about 76% were counted as Jewish, though some of those are not considered Jewish under Orthodox Jewish law. Since 1989, nearly a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel, making this the largest wave of immigration since independence. In addition, an estimated 105,000 members of the Ethiopian Jewish community have immigrated to Israel, 14,000 of them during the dramatic May 1991 Operation Solomon airlift. 32.9% of Israelis were born outside of Israel.
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