2011/02/01 by N. Perez · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Turkey's Politics and Society #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1093/mj/kjq032
openalex publication_date 2011/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
A person of Bulgarian origin shall acquire Bulgarian citizenship through a facilitated procedure.1 Can Israel’s “Law of Return” (LOR) be justified in the context of the norms of contemporary liberal thought? That is the question on which this article will focus. I shall argue, via several cumulative arguments, that it can be justified—albeit in a qualified manner that tends to either over-justify the law (by including cases beyond the law’s current formulation) or under-justify it (by excluding some of the categories included in the law). The justifications I shall present are as follows: (1) If the LOR is illiberal, it is “a response” to illiberal persecution, and therefore justified on the basis of the nation-state’s responsibility not to allow Diaspora members of the national group that exercise the right to self-determination in this state to be harmed; (2) the law is justified following several liberal–national arguments that justify preferential treatment of immigrants belonging to a national group that exercises the right to national self-determination in the “destination” country; and (3) following changes in conversion opportunities (including the first steps towards secular Jewish conversion), the LOR can be reinterpreted as cultural rather than ethnicity-based, and hence liberal and legitimate.2