On July 5, about a week and a half after the US Supreme Court rendered its historic decision that single-sex marriage is constitutional, the reverse process began in Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fourth government adopted a series of resolutions that void or emasculate the resolutions taken by Netanyahu’s third government, only a few months ago. The significance of these recent decisions is that the government is taking a giant step backward with everything connected to conversion, enforcing kosher food laws and the treatment of personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and family disputes. By law, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate handles personal status matters and issues kosher certificates to food factories and restaurants. In all of these domains, the government retracted its former, more tolerant resolutions that attempted to promote the more moderate streams in Judaism, and instead it handed victory over to the most conservative sector of Orthodox Judaism, represented by the ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset.

The inevitable conclusions regarding the resolutions of Netanyahu’s government are disquieting. While the United States continues its liberal revolution and integration of absolute values of freedom in all spheres of life, Israel is heading in the opposite direction: a state that is more religious and conservative and much less free and liberal. This is a political, demographic, social and moral victory that intensifies the sense of besiegement engulfing Israel’s liberal, left-wing and Tel Aviv elite circles. (Tel Aviv is considered by many as Israel's ''secular capital.'') This process exacerbates the reality of two totally different Jewish "states" that already exist side by side in Israel: the secular one and the religious one. The problem is that the way things look now, these two entities do not exist in mutual coexistence but in reciprocal hostility and mistrust.

The two resolutions adopted on July 5 were to transfer the rabbinical conversion courts, which render judgments according to ancient Jewish religious law, from its natural place in the Justice Department (all the other courts are there) to the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party-run Religious Services Ministry. This decision will probably make it very difficult to appoint less-extreme religious judges with a worldview allowing women to receive fair, egalitarian treatment, even in Jewish religious law, for instance. Most of the rabbinical judges who hold a more gender-egalitarian worldview are not affiliated with the ultra-Orthodox parties.

The second decision revoked the conversion reform that was accepted by Netanyahu’s previous government only eight months ago. That reform would have allowed the rabbis of Israel’s cities to establish municipal religious conversion courts (as opposed to the long-year national Chief Rabbinate conversion court) and convert new immigrants or Israelis whose Judaism could be under question. This expansion would have allowed the masses who want to convert to circumvent the rigid rabbinic courts that raise all possible barriers in front of those who want to join the Jewish religion. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of good Israelis who live in Israel and die in it, serve in the Israel Defense Forces, pay taxes and have children. The Israeli law of return grants citizenship to every Jew arriving to the country, provided that one of his parents was Jewish. The ultra-Orthodox definition of a Jew is more restrictive, hence the "masses."