Most people probably don't realize that there is no institution of civil marriage in Israel. A Jewish couple must go through the rabbinical institutions, tightly held by the ultra-orthodox, to get a marriage license. A Jew and a non-Jew have no way to legally marry. (Never mind a gay couple, obviously.) The saving grace is international law: the state has to recognize the marriage of couples married outside of the country. Many, including a friend of mine who recently got fed up with having to pay money and produce endless documents and witnesses to prove he was Jewish enough, get married in Cyprus to exploit this loophole.

Anyway, two Knesset members proposed a bill to legalize civil marriage in Israel, and it was overwhelmingly defeated. Small parties (there are many) can have disproportionate power in Israel's parliamentary-coalition system, so the big parties vying to select the next prime minister didn't want to upset the ultra-orthodox parties. The far-left opposed the bill, supposedly, because it didn't include gays. (If that excuse is serious, it is surely absurd: if they'll only support a bill that no one else would support, how can there be any progress?)

Israel is officially a secular country. But the religious aspects of its national narrative, and the growing, anti-modernist power of the ultra-religious (whose constituents do not serve in the military and take far more from state welfare than they contribute to the economy), threaten to make that secularism meaningless. The defeat of this bill confirms the direction the country is still moving in. The government of Cyprus can rest assured that a lucrative source of tourism and state licensing revenue won't be threatened.