Israel has not banned preaching about Jesus, despite a video shared online saying otherwise. The bill behind the claim was filed in January 2023 and stalled within weeks.
The difference matters for pilgrims, church groups and mission organisations with links to Israel. Talking about faith there is legal. Two narrower acts are crimes, and both have been on the books since 1977.
What the 2023 bill proposed
The proposal came from Moshe Gafni and Yaakov Asher, members of United Torah Judaism, one of the six parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition. They submitted it on 9 January 2023, seeking to prohibit soliciting a person directly to change religion. The text set out one year in prison for an adult conversion and two years where a minor was involved, and its explanatory notes singled out Christian missionary groups.
The bill drew little attention until March. Anger among pro-Israel evangelicals followed a report by the Christian outlet All Israel News, and a former United States religious freedom ambassador, Sam Brownback, publicly opposed it.
On 22 March 2023, Netanyahu posted on Twitter, now X: “We will not advance any law against the Christian community.” Gafni then said the bill had been tabled at the start of each Knesset session as a matter of procedure. It never progressed beyond the proposal stage.
The video gets the timeline wrong. It dates the bill to 2020 and says it was presented to the president before being blocked. Neither happened.
A bill filed again and again
The 2023 text was not new. Gafni has proposed anti-missionary bills in one form or another at the start of every Knesset since 1999. An earlier attempt went further. In 1998, Labour lawmaker Nissim Zvili sponsored a bill criminalising written proselytising material, then withdrew it after dozens of evangelical groups publicly pledged not to carry out missionary work in Israel.
What Israeli law already bans
The existing limits sit in the 1977 Penal Law. Anyone who gives or promises money or another material benefit to induce a person to change religion faces up to five years in prison. The United States State Department’s 2022 religious freedom report states that proselytising to anyone under 18 without the consent of both parents is illegal.
Beyond those two limits, sharing faith with adults is lawful. Tamar Hofnung, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, told USA Today that no legal prohibition on preaching Christianity exists in Israel and that free speech protects it. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a psychology professor at the University of Haifa, said he was not aware of anyone being charged under the penal code for proselytising.
Legal is not the same as welcome
The law and daily life do not always match. The same 2022 State Department report recorded that Christian clergy and pilgrims said ultra-Orthodox Jews regularly harassed and spat at them, and that some Jews regard missionary work aimed at Jews as religious harassment.
Other errors in the video
The speaker says Jesus was born in Nazareth, in Palestine. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke place his birth in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. Nazareth, where he grew up, is in northern Israel.
The video also credits King Solomon with building the Western Wall. The wall is a retaining wall from King Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple compound in the first century BC.
A 2026 legal guide to Israeli law lists verbal sharing of faith, personal testimony and most distribution of religious literature as legal, with targeting minors without parental consent still an offence.
