Asterisks instead of 'Jewish' on ID card
Asterisks instead of 'Jewish' on ID cardGil Ronen

MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) reacted Tuesday to news that the first Aramaean baby has been registered in Israel, following the decision to recognize the Aramaean nationality, by calling for the Jewish state to recognize another nationality – the Jewish one.

In 2002, then-Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) passed a decision through the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, mandating that the word “Jewish” in the “nationality” rubric in the ID cards of Jewish citizens be replaced with a row of asterisks.

He did so in order to avoid complying with a High Court decision that would have forced the government to write “Jewish” in the ID cards of people who underwent a Reform or Conservative conversion, but were not recognized as Jewish by the Orthodox stream.

"Since the days of the Oslo Accords, the Jewish nationality became a string of asterisks in the empty space of our ID cards,” wrote Feiglin on Facebook (the Hebrew word for asterisk is a diminutive of the word for 'star' -- ed.). “We became a sort of UFO 'nation of all its citizens,'” he added, employing a favored leftist phrase often used to denote a multinational or non-national state.

"The return to the Jewish identity, bringing back the Jewish nationality to the Israeli ID card – in the widest sense – is this generation's mission,” he concluded. “On a personal note, this should be the first mission of the new Interior Minister.”