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Received 5/9/97
Source: "World Evangelical Fellowship's Religious Liberty
e-mail Conference."
Click to read AMF's previous posting on this subject
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has been feeling the pressure of the many thousands of letters that have been sent to its Embassies around the world. In Finland, for example, reports state that 7,000 signatures to a letter of protest were sent in, and a planned interview is to take place with the Israeli Ambassador there. Thirty thousand friends of Israel are now being asked to protest by postcard to the Israeli Embassies. The Governments of Norway and Denmark have raised the issue, as have members of the U.S. Congress and other influential friends of Israel. Mr. Netanyahu himself has been spoken to on the matter on a number of occasions.
The Netherlands Parliament has discussed the proposal of the law in Israel, British and Canadian members of Parliament have taken the matter up with the Israeli Government and the British Foreign Minister has instructed his Embassy in Israel to follow the process closely. Many international bodies such as the Rutherford Institute and World Evangelical Fellowship's Religious Liberty Commission have addressed the Israeli Government on the matter. The Israeli Ambassador to Norway has written home to say that this proposed law could cause damage on Israel's relations with friends in Norway. These are but samples of the kind of response the international community has given to the bill now before the Israeli Parliament.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has thrice altered the answers it gives to those who write in to protest this proposed law. When these are countered by repeat letters which take up, issue by issue, the Embassy's responses, a new reply is composed with the hope that it will at last succeed to stem the flood of letters continually coming in.
This repeated modification of the content of replies given is a clear indiction that the Foreign Ministry here has heard the voice of protest and is seeking to orchestrate a response that will lull protesters into believing that their concern has been addressed and appropriately resolved. THAT IS STILL NOT THE CASE! The Knesset Committee of Law, Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence (which is handling the draft of the bill) must still officially reject the proposed law. Until the Government takes a clear stand, it cannot hide behind the fig-leaf of its present claim that it did not promote the bill nor support it.
The most recent embassy response has served to try and sharpen the point, namely, that the bill is a "private members" bill, not one proposed by the Government. They also state that the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Proposed Legislation twice recommended that the Government oppose it.
All that is true. The Government did NOT support the bill, but two prominent members of the Government did (Mr. Dan Meridor, the Minister of the Treasury, and Mrs. Limor Livant, Minister of telecommunications). The bill is also being actively promoted by senior civil servants, particularly in the Ministry of Education. The Government has not yet taken a clear stand on the issue beyond a weak expression of general opposition in the Knesset Plenum, when the bill came up for the Preliminary Reading.
In addition, the Messianic Action Committee has reported that the front-runner in the race for Labour Party leadership, Ehud Barak, has said he would support the bill "because he will need the support of the Orthodox following the next elections" in order to establish a coalition government.
The mere proposal of such a bill seems to have already affected the general atmosphere in Israel. A young man was removed from his military unit solely because he had converted to (some form of) Christianity. Another was ticketed by an Eilat municipal inspector for "distributing religious literature" as if this were an illegal activity. A judge issued an illegal seach warrant, allowing the police to enter the home of a believer and confiscate religious literature. Her grounds: "suspicion of a change of religion" - a crime nowhere mentioned in Israeli statute books. Two Christian bookshops in Jerusalem received warnings that they should close down or be burnt down. An Ethiopian Messianic Jew was hounded by the police, who also confiscated his religious literature.
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