Despite the immense economic crisis in Israel and the challenge of lowering the daily rate of COVID-19 cases, a bill was proposed today in the Knesset addressing an entirely different issue—the Law of Return.

MK Bezalel Smotrich of the Yemina alliance proposed a bill seeking to cancel the ‘grandchild clause’ in the Law of Return, which allows for anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to make Aliyah and obtain Israeli citizenship. The clause was added to the law in 1970 and is largely understood as had been done so in connection to the Nuremburg Laws in Nazi Germany, defining those with one Jewish grandparent as Jews.

In a post on his Facebook page, Smotrich asserted that the rationale of Hitler and Nazi race laws was never mentioned in the original High Court decisions for inserting the grandchild clause into the law. Instead, he claims that, “it was made up,” and that it is no more than, “cheap demagoguery and a shameful misuse of the Holocaust in order to damage the Jewish nature of the state, and flood it with...