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Revision as of 10:09, 10 October 2005 by Marskell (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)At 77% Judaism constitutes the largest religion in Israel. Muslims make up 16% of the population, while the remainder are Christian or unspecified.
Judaism
Main article: Judaism in Israel
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Islam
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Status of Religious Freedom
The State of Israel generally allows freedom of religion for all religious communities, both in law and in practice, as Freedom House reports: "Freedom of religion is respected. Each community has jurisdiction over its own members in matters of marriage, burial, and divorce." However, some minority religious communities face social pressure and, on occasion, obstruction from the government.
Messianic Jews, who accept Jesus as the Messiah, face frequent hostility and intermittent attacks. In 2000 a Messianic church was raided in Jerusalem and its Bible scroll stolen A congregation in Arad faced demonstrations and an arson attack in 2005. . Christians in Jerusalem's Old City complain of frequent spitting attacks by Jewish yeshiva students. One local Armenian Apostolic bishop declared in October 2004 that such attacks occurred at least once a week. In May 2003, Israeli government officials destroyed a newly-built Bedouin mosque in the village of Tal el-Malah after villagers defied a government ban on building a mosque to serve the local 1,500 Muslims. The nearest mosque was more than 12 kms away. Permission has been denied for Muslims to build mosques in other Bedouin villages.
Israel was founded to provide a national home, safe from persecution, to the Jewish people. Although Israeli law explicitly grants equal civil rights to all citizens regardless of religion, ethnicity, or other heritage, it gives preferential treatment in certain aspects to individuals who fall within the criteria mandated by the Law of Return.
The criteria set forth by the Law of Return is controversial. It differs from halacha (Jewish religious law) in that it disqualifies individuals who are ethnically Jewish but who converted to another religion; and also in that it grants immigrant status to individuals who are not ethnically Jewish but are related to Jews.
While the Law of Return is directly concerned with non-citizens, certain Israeli laws have used the phrase "persons who would have benefited from the Law of Return had they been outside the borders of Israel" in order to define which citizens of Israel will benefit from different programs.
Israel is sometimes accused of acts of persecution against Palestinians, although even critics of Israel do not see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict as being primarily religiously motivated. While these conflicts may use religious overtones or rhetoric, they are generally considered military and political struggles.