The debate over summary conversion in Israel is misplaced. The real question is not, how to make a bad Jew out of good Gentile, but how to make Jews…Jews.

The common argument that Israeli Slavs became Jewish by serving in IDF is mistaken. They would have served equally well in the army of anti-Semitic Russia had they stayed there. They serve in the army for the very reason they pay taxes: the state’s compulsion. They cannot claim religious reasons for draft evasion, and so they serve.

The fact of living in Israel also does not make them Jewish. Russians in Latvia hardly feel themselves to be Latvian, and Israeli Jewish symbolism and nationalism is much stronger than Latvian.
The problematic number of non-assimilated Slavs is much larger than the commonly reported figure of 300,000. That figure counts only those who are not halachic Jews and have come within the past twenty years. To be sure, some of them are practically Jewish; often, children of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers strongly identify with Jews. There is a much more suspect group: Jews by grand- or great-grandmother. Though halachically Jewish, they do not share our identity in the least. That’s besides their frequently forged documents. Moreover, non-Jewish immigration did not start in 1988: Gentile spouses have entered our country since its inception and did so in small numbers even before then. Before the 1960s no one even bothered to verify their Jewishness; they wrote whatever they wanted on their immigration papers. They produced non-Jewish children with perfectly Jewish papers. The most conservative estimates put the total number of practically fake Jews at 800,000.

Moreover, more than 100,000 Israeli women with fertility problems received eggs from Eastern European donors; biologically, their children are completely un-Jewish. Add to these the great numbers of mamzerim, who are technically bastards ineligible for marriage because their Jewish mothers did not obtain proper divorces before remarrying. Throw in a commonly ignored rabbinical prohibition for Jews to marry converts. Consider the Torah’s prohibition against cohen—priestly descendants—marrying converts; and many cohens don’t know of their origin.

The government deliberately made the problem irresolvable by abrogating the use of religion for ID papers. Officiating rabbis desperately try to prevent assimilation by requesting all kinds of corroborating evidence from marrying couples, usually Soviet-era documents which specified religion/nationality. The second generation of Russian Israelis won’t keep their parents’ Soviet papers, and there will be no way to check their Jewishness in most cases.

Rather than distilling Jews from Israelis, we should ban non-Jewishness. The ban would equally apply to Jews and Gentiles alike. In times of old, foreigners could only reside in the Land of Israel with the status of ger, a de facto convert.

Several of the commandments exist to expunge non-Jewishness from the Land of Israel. No one can work on Shabbat or keep leaven on Pesach “in your towns,” eat blood or animals slaughtered in a non-kosher manner, or commit sexual immorality. Foreign worship, idolatrous statues, icons, and practices are proscribed from this land. Once Israel enforces the basic commandments, the problem of non-Jews would fade away. If they want to live in the Land of Israel, risk their lives, observe basic commandments, abandon foreign worship, pass for Jews, and marry Jews, then we have no reason to consider their children non-Jewish. This is not an innovation, but a return to the traditional practice, which did not know conversion but relied on de facto Jewishness.

The ger option is closed to Arabs: the Torah commands us to leave no native in the Land of Israel because they would always hate us for robbing them of their country.