From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Sep 30 2009 - 00:36:42 EDT
Israel's Fear of Jewish Girls Dating Arabs; Team of Psychologists to
"Rescue" Women
By Jonathan Cook, AlterNet
Posted on September 25, 2009, Printed on September 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142900/
A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special
team of youth counselors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify
young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and "rescue" them.
The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is
the latest in a series of separate -- and little discussed -- initiatives
from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli
residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.
In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that
residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of
Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style
patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.
Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel's ethnic
divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a
threat to the state's Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in
2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage
should be equated with "national treason."
Since the state's founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal
and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the
possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens,
the latter comprising a fifth of the population.
Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that
there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to get to know each
other. Even in the handful of "mixed cities", Arab residents are usually
confined to separate neighborhoods.
In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small
number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by
leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognized on
the couple's return.
Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of
interracial marriages was "too small to be studied." "Separation between
Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that
anyone manages to escape these central controls."
The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in
direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were
accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish
man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl
was from Petah Tikva.
The girls' involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern
that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode
among some young people.
In sentiments widely shared, Hezi Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva
municipality, said "Russian girls" -- young Jewish women whose parents
arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the collapse of the
former Soviet Union -- were particularly vulnerable to the attention of
Arab men.
Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships
with Arab men because they "did not undergo the religious and Zionist
education" to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.
Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and
friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.
"We can't tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their
home to offer them and their parents advice," he said.
Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality
was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide
apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the
Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into
the city as a result.
Petah Tikva's hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is
shared by other communities.
In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are
reported to belong to a patrol known as "Fire for Judaism" that tries to
stop interracial dating.
One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post
newspaper, said: "Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to
explain to them the dangers of what they're getting themselves into. In the
last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian]
villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren't heard from after
that."
He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.
Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in
southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of
the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video
titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an
"unnatural phenomenon."
Haim Shalom, head of the municipality's welfare department, is filmed
saying: "The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab." A
police representative also warns that the Bedouin men's "goal is to take
advantage of the girls. There is no element of love or an innocent friendly
relationship here."
In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning
Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to "beatings, hard drugs,
prostitution and crime."
Safed's chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the
"seducing" of Jewish girls was "another form of war" by Arab men.
Both Kiryat Gat and Safed's campaigns were supported by a religious
organisation called Yad L'achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team
publicly dedicated to "saving" Jewish women.
According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a
month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West
Bank. It launches "military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab
villages" in co-ordination with the police and army.
"The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not
prepared to give up on even a single one," says the website.
Yad L'achim's founder, Rabbi Shlomo Dov Lifschitz, is quoted on the site
saying: "People must understand that Jewish-Arab marriages are part of the
larger Israeli-Arab conflict. They [Arab men] see it as their goal to marry
them [Jewish women] and ensure that their childen aren't raised as Jews.
This is their revenge against the Jewish people. They feel that if they
can't defeat us in war, they can wipe us out this way."
The degree of general opposition in Israel to interracial marriage was
suggested by a government-backed television ad campaign earlier this month
that urged Israeli Jews to inform on relatives abroad who were in danger of
marrying a non-Jew. The ads were hastily withdrawn by surprised Israeli
officials after many US Jews took offence.
In her book Birthing the Nation, Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Middle East scholar at
New York University, points out that "politicians frequently attack 'peace'
or 'dialogue' programs for promoting miscegenation" in fear that it will
lead to Jewish assimilation.
She also notes that Israel's adoption and surrogacy laws require that
adoptive parents be of the same ethnic group as the biological mother.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National
(www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His
website is www.jkcook.net.