NAZARETH, November 15, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Nazareth District Court ruled 2-1 yesterday that Israel is required to recognize inheritance rights between homosexual couples. The court ruled that since the inheritance law makes an allowance for non-married common-law couples to have inheritance rights, homosexual couples must also be allowed those rights.
The clause in the inheritance law states, “a man and a woman who live a family life in a joint household, yet who are not married to each other,” are to be granted the same inheritance rights as married couples. While the state argued that “man and woman” could not be interpreted to mean homosexual partners, Judges Nissim Maman and Gabriella (De Leo) Levy ruled that since that clause was initiated in 1965, “there have been wide-reaching changes in interpretation, and legal rulings have widened the meaning of the term `partners’ to include common-law partners, as well as same-sex common-law partners.” Thus the judges said the phrase “man and woman” does not mean “not a man and a man” or “not a woman and a woman,” but rather “a couple who is not married.”
Judge Menahem Ben-David dissented. “The letter of the law is clear and unequivocal and you cannot read into it any meaning other than what is written – `man and woman.’ The letter of the law cannot tolerate the interpretation according to which this would be `man and man’,” he wrote. Ayin Mem applied to the courts to inherit his homosexual partner’s estate since no provision was made in his partner’s will. jhw