The Prime Minister's Office intends to reduce or end child allowances to families in which the father has more than one wife. PMO director general Avigdor Yitzhaki will today meet legal advisers from the PMO and the Interior, Finance and Justice ministries to discuss proposals recently formulated on the issue.
"Polygamy is a blatantly illegal and immoral custom," Yitzhaki told Haaretz. "The purpose of such marriages is to bring as many children as possible into the world so as to boost the allowances paid by the state. The payments are a serious incentive, but these children are born into distress, into a bad life."
Yitzhaki said bigamy was forbidden by law but the Sharia (Islamic law) courts in Israel were allowing Muslim men to divorce their wives and marry other women. "This circumvents the civil law," Yitzhaki said. "It also undermines the natural balance because men are bringing in women from other places for trading purposes. We want to curtail this practice as much as possible."
A source involved in the issue believes, however, that most of the ideas raised until now cannot be put into practice since they discriminate against a certain group of children and so would not pass a test in the High Court of Justice. The only proposal that has a chance, the source said, was a uniform child allowance for all families in the country, in accordance with the coalition agreement between the Likud, the National Religious Party and Shinui.
However, the source added, such a move would be detrimental to large Jewish and Arab families, regardless of the polygamy issue.
At present, the High Court is considering petitions against a law that reduces child allowances for families without army veterans by 20 percent. In the past, Israel paid a higher allowance to families with army veterans, but this mainly affected the Arab population as the ultra-Orthodox were compensated in other ways. The government of Yitzhak Rabin scrapped the practice in the early 1990s.
It appears that budget concerns are not the only motives behind the initiative of Yitzhaki and the director of the Population Registry, Herzl Gadz. It also targets the practice of Bedouin men bringing women from the territories and Jordan in as additional wives. Some of these women come to Israel with children from previous marriages.
The Sanegor Kehilati volunteer organization for promoting the rights of the Bedouin population is outraged by Yitzhaki's initiative and believes it is no way to discourage polygamy.
"In a properly functioning state, it should be dealt with through educational and legal channels, and not by harming the victims of the practice - the women and children," Saliman Algrinawi, an activist in the organization, wrote to Yitzhaki. The proposal would only increase discrimination and widen poverty, Algrinawi said.
"It is a very dangerous move. Today, efforts will be made to prevent the Bedouin from having children. Tomorrow, these efforts will be directed against the ultra-Orthodox or Sephardis," he said. The director of the organization's branch in Be'er Sheva, Hadas Barzilai, said the state must enforce the law against men who take more than one wife and not harm their children or spouses, who are the victims.
The extent of polygamy in Israel - practiced mainly among the Bedouin - is not known but around 30 percent of Bedouin men are believed to have more than one wife. More than 60 percent of the 130,000-strong Bedouin population in the south are children, so the number of families that could be affected by Yitzhaki's initiative is relatively small, although the number of children is very high.
A study conducted last year by Prof. Julie Cwikel of Ben-Gurion University among 202 Bedouin women aged 22-75 revealed that only 10 percent had completed high-school, 35 percent were involved in polygamous marriages, 60 percent were married to relatives
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