Michael Safyan's answer to How can a non-Jewish person get citizenship of Israel?

Does one need to be Jewish to be a citizen of Israel?

Rabbi's grandson, attended Jewish day school, family spans denominations · Author has 6.3K answers and 8.1M answer views · Updated 1y ·

[NOTE: Originally answered: “Do you have to be Jewish in order to be a citizen of Israel?”]

No. Although Israel is the only Jewish-majority country in the world, it is not an exclusively Jewish country; in 2019, Jews are just under 75% of the population , with Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bahai, and other religions represented in the population.

As stated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence (emphasis mine):

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Although Israel is a “Jewish state” in that it is the homeland and safe-haven for the Jewish people, it is not a state for Jews only. Nor is it a theocracy; the government is secular, run by secular processes, has members of parliament who are not Jewish, and does not run according to the dictates of any sort of religious authority (in fact, this is a sticking point for a small number of Jewish fundamentalist groups that reject Israel, not because they do not support the country’s existence in principle, but because they believe that it should be a theocracy). It is also the case that the majority of Jewish Israelis are secular or only moderately religious:

As can be seen from the graphic above, the largest segment of Jewish Israelis identify as hiloni, a term which means “secular”; the second largest group, masorti, means “traditional”, a category for whom Judaism is important but which occupies a wide middle ground of practices and beliefs; dati (lit. “religious”) is the equivalent of Orthodox in the United States, while haredi is a subcategory/sect of Orthodox that is often labeled as “Ultra Orthodox” in the US by those outside of those sects.