Israel stops passport issuance on arrival for new immigrants

Starting July 10, immigrants who gain their Israeli citizenship through the Law of Return will have to prove their centre of life is in the Jewish state before receiving their passports, ending the practice of passport on arrival.

Following a multi-hour filibuster staged by opposition parties, the Knesset passed a law that ends a legislative agreement the government made with the Yisrael Beytenu party in 2017 to allow immediate passports for new citizens who immigrate to Israel by claiming legally recognized Jewish heritage, according to The Times of Israel.

The Interior Ministry-sponsored change is expected to reinstate a one-year residency requirement to prove that Israel is the centre of a new citizen’s life. Until then, new arrivals can receive temporary travel documents.

The law comes after Israel saw an influx of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of its western neighbour.

An earlier version of the law was proposed by MK Yosef Taieb, whose ultra-Orthodox Shas party has been locked in a bitter political battle with secularist Yisrael Beytenu. Yisrael Beytenu opposes Haredi's attempts to place religious curbs on public life in Israel and has railed against government handouts for the community.

Touching on an issue of great significance to Yisrael Beytenu’s base of former Soviet state immigrants, Taieb has pushed for revoking the Law of Return’s so-called “grandchild clause,” which allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to qualify for Israeli citizenship, provided they are not actively practising another religion.

The religious parties — the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism and Shas parties, and the national-religious Otzma Yehudit, Noam and Religious Zionism — argue that since many of the people immigrating to Israel under this clause are not Jewish according to most interpretations of Jewish law, it weakens the “Jewish character” of the state.

Eliminating the grandchild clause would primarily affect would-be immigrants from the former Soviet Union, largely due to cultural norms in those countries in which ethnicity is patrilineal, despite the fact that, under Jewish law, Jewishness is passed down from the mother.

Last November, the Knesset released data that said 72% of immigrants from former Soviet states between 1990 and 2020 were not considered Jewish by strict religious standards of descent. The report caused an uproar, with religious lawmakers across the political spectrum renewing calls to tighten Jewish immigration standards.

The Interior Ministry has said that the policy change will help crack down on abuses to the system, whereby immigrants take on Israeli citizenship to obtain a more favourable passport, but never actually settle in the country.

Last week, Gil Bringer, the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority, testified to a Knesset committee that he believed people took on Israeli citizenship to take advantage of expanded visa-free travel, which hurt the integrity of the passport.

“The strength of the Israeli passport erodes alongside the erosion of the connection between having an Israeli passport and the connection to the State of Israel,” he said.