Guy claims Israeli is recruiting immigrants with barely any Jewish heritage, to ensure they could outvote the Arabs. OK, set the conspiracy theory aside; that's not the fun part.
The fun part is that this guy claimed that these immigrants could never become Israelis. He didn't say they couldn't become real Jews, but that they couldn't become Israelis.
I pointed out that the Israeli government granting them citizenship automatically made them Israelis, just as the US granting citizenship to immigrants makes them Americans, but he wasn't buying it.
No, he insisted, they could never become Israelis. How could I be so dumb, he wondered, such a klown (sic).
I asked if that meant my Dutch immigrant father-in-law, who's lived in the US more than half a century and is a US citizen could not be an American. He didn't answer, but shifted to a claim that he was talking about dual citizenship (which seems to be a popular topic among the anti-Israel crowd, as though it's so I kind of nefarious plot). So, I asked, if my father-in-law had been able to keep his Dutch citizenship when he became an American citizen, he could not be an American?
No answer to that, of course, and somewhere in all that an accusation that I was just playing semantics.
But now you know, there's at least one country in the world that cannot confer national status on someone by granting them citizenship. Or maybe none can. It's not clear.