Hear, O Israel?

Today, the House of Commons gave a Third Reading to a Bill that extended even the existing power of the Home Secretary to revoke the British citizenship of anyone whom she merely supposed to be eligible for another nationality. She will no longer even have to notify anyone whose citizenship she revoked, meaning that there would be no meaningful right of appeal. No one will have to have been convicted of anything, or even so much as arrested. The Labour Party voted against this, but it has no policy of repealing it.

Those in danger of denationalisation will include everyone who was Jewish under the Israeli Law of Return, which is considerably more extensive than the halachic definition of Jewishness. This is the most anti-Semitic piece of legislation anywhere in the Western world since the Holocaust, and it ought to inspire international outrage.

It is tempting to hope that Russia, China and Iran might lead that outrage. But what of Israel? In very recent years, there have come to be, for the first time ever, more Jews in Israel than in the rest of the world put together. This is a test case for the new relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. Theodor Herzl said that anyone who stayed in the Diaspora after the establishment of the Jewish State would have ceased to be Jewish. Priti Patel now says that they might also cease to be British. What say Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Hotovely?