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KNESSET DEFEATS BILL FOR CIVIL WEDDINGS
by Gill Hoffman and Hilary Leila Kreiger
Jerusalem Post, March 10, 2004
The coalition defeated two bills in the Knesset on Wednesday which would allow civil marriage.
The bills, which each fell 58-29, were designed to shame Shinui but ended up embarrassing the Labor Party instead.
Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz and Meretz MK Roman Bronfman submitted the same legislation that Shinui leader Yosef Lapid introduced in the previous Knesset. Pines-Paz and Bronfman took turns accusing Shinui of hypocrisy from the Knesset podium for not supporting the bills.
But the bill's sponsors were unaware that coalition chairman Gideon Sa'ar secretly gave Shinui MKs the right to vote in favor of the bill, while two-thirds of the Labor faction walked out on the vote, because Labor's platform opposes civil marriage. When the votes were counted, nine Shinui MKs voted in favor and only eight Labor MKs.
"They tried to embarrass us and the opposite happened," Shinui faction chairman Reshef Cheyne said. "Just like the biblical story of Bilam, they came to curse us and we ended up blessed."
Lapid said that when a governmental commission on civil marriage headed by Likud MK Roni Bar-On completes its work, Shinui and the National Religious Party will jointly submit legislation that he believes will solve the problems of some 300,000 citizens who are unable to marry.
Sa'ar decided prior to the vote to allow Shinui MKs to vote in favor, because he knew he would have an easy majority without the Shinui MKs.
Shinui ministers abstained, including Environment Minister Yehudit Naot, who made her first appearance in the Knesset after several months absence due to her laryngeal and throat cancer.
The Labor-Meimad MKs who boycotted the vote included party chairman Shimon Peres, and MKs Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Michael Melchior, and Isaac Herzog, grandson of his namesake who was Israel's first chief rabbi. Herzog said he would only back civil marriage along the lines of Meimad's idea of "couplehood registration," which would preserve the formal religious record of marriage according to Jewish law.
Pines-Paz said the vote indicates that he has less impact on his colleagues than United Torah Judaism MKs. Meretz MKs slammed Labor for letting the vote fall.
"The Labor mice ran away again, proving once again that Labor is unfit to head the opposition, let alone the country, and that the party has no chance of resurrecting itself," MK Yossi Sarid said.
MK Ran Cohen, a candidate for the leadership of the new Yahad party, called upon the public to grant a civil divorce to Labor and Shinui, which he accused of being "coward parties."
Cohen's challenger in the Yahad race, Yossi Beilin, said the countdown to the end of Shinui has begun.
"The moment that the head of Shinui disqualified the civil marriage bill, he disqualified the right to exist of his party that was formed to make civil marriage a reality," said Beilin, who predicted that Shinui would fade into history like the formerly successful Dash party.
Lapid responded that "Beilin never let the facts get in the way of his opinions" and asked for an apology.
"The fact that more Shinui MKs than Labor and Meretz MKs voted in favor of the bill still hasn't entered Beilin's dormant mind," Lapid said.
Meanwhile, sporting bright red heart-shaped balloons declaring "freedom of choice in marriage," more than 100 supporters of civil marriage gathered outside the Knesset to urge members to vote for the bill.
Several demonstrators also voiced criticism of Labor MKs who skipped the vote and Shinui ministers who abstained, despite the party's previous demand for civil marriage.
"It [the Shinui ministers' decision] is a sick joke," said Ilya Adzhiashvili, former director of the forum. He compared the current marriage regulations to the "Nazi Nuremberg laws. Two Jews can marry. Two non-Jews can marry, but a non-Jew and Jew can't marry. It's Hitler's law."
At his side stood Oleg, a 37-year-old Ukrainian who immigrated four years ago and can't marry his fiancee here because she's not Jewish.
He pointed out that his choices include converting to Christianity as well as the more common flight to Cyprus, but both options are unsatisfactory.
"I want to get married here," he said.
Zamira Segev, coordinator of the Forum for Freedom of Choice in Marriage – a coalition of new immigrant, civil rights, and religious pluralism groups which organized the rally – said that while Shinui hasn't done enough on the issue, she was glad that some members voted for the bill.
"I think the pressure we put on Shinui was fruitful," she said before blasting Laborites who had no coalition agreements to keep them from backing the measure and still refrained from voting.
"They really betrayed their voters," she said.
Conservative Rabbi Ehud Bandel, president of the movement in Israel, said money and power are at the root of the rabbinate's opposition to the "free market" of civil marriage and marriage performed by reform and conservative rabbis, all of which the bill would have allowed.
"The absurdity is that I can be a rabbi anywhere in the world, at least anywhere in the Western democratic world, except in my homeland, the Jewish State," he said.
Rabbi Ehud Bandel, President of the Masorti Movement in Israel, said yesterday that Labor's "true face has been exposed" after they refrained form supporting Paz-Pines' bill. Bandel commended Shinui's MKs for supporting the bill.
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