By Jonathan Cook * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors 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 become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.
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 recognised on the couple’s return.
Dr 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, Mr 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 former Soviet Union collapsed, 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.
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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.
Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem’s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.
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.”
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.
* 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” and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair“. His website is www.jkcook.net.
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I regard the courage of young Jewish women dating Arab men as a sign of hope for the future. It gives the lie to ridiculous Israeli racialism. Racist Israeli attitudes towards this issue are ridiculous because Jews claim to be “Semites,” (remember “Anti-Semitism?), yet they protest vehemently when their women date other Semites!! In fact, of course, Israeli Jews are typically NOT Semites. As professor Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University documents, Israeli Askenazim are descended from European Jews, who were in turn descended from the Khazars of Central Asia, who converted to Judaism from paganism in the ninth century, and who had, moreover, NEVER SET FOOT IN PALESTINE. In supreme irony, the Israeli Askenazim are persecuting and killing the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, THE PALESTINIANS, who long ago intermarried with the ancient Canaanites and Philistines, and who, over the centuries, converted first to Christianity and then to Islam, though some continued to adhere to Judaism and spread to many other Middle Eastern countries, where they still live today. All this goes to show that people are just people, and should be free to associate with and marry anyone they choose. Perhaps the intermarriage of Israeli Jews and Arabs will help to at last bring peace to Palestine. Love conquers all, even stupid, myopic Israeli racialism.
James i liked what you said i have read your comment very carefully and i realy enjoyed reading it. If everyone thourt that way their would’nt be people suffuring in this world thank you for reading my msg to you bye 4 now.
The above article makes it hard to believe that Jesus was a Jew, let alone a rabbi. Arab men are Christians, and Moslems, as well as Jews (according to the mysterious and deceased Jack Bernstein, “Farewell to Israel”
http://www.iamthewitness.com/books/Jack.Bernstein/My.Farewell.to.Israel.htm
). So, it’s not about religion, Judaism, or assimilation. It’s about domination, which cannot come about if Arab men are treated as human beings (neighbors).
Over the years I have keep an open mind on the Chosen people of God almighty – my conclusion is that the methods used by the State of Israel are anti-christian, anti-everything.
Jewishness modern day is very destructive towards the rest of the World – remember the “Liberty” the ship that was attached by Israel and totally ignored by the US government. Christian bible predicts destruction of 2/3 of the Jewish population in the end times – it will happen.
Apartheid Israel.
Everybody has had an Israeli girl, so why can’t a Palestinian man?
James is exactly correct. I love it when I read peoples statements who really know what they are talking about instead of those who just regurgitate hate! Keep up the excellent work of educating people about the facts James! Racism is an evil tool.
Zionism is the last vestige of Nazism.Hitler believed in a “chosen” master race too good to assimilate with lesser peoples. Zionism believes in a “chosen” master race too good to assimilate with lesser people. Hitler ethnically cleansed the non-Germans from the German state. Zionists ethnically cleanse the non-Jews from the Jewish state. Notice how Jewish “civil rights” groups that have pushed everything from hate crime laws, open borders, integration, affirmative action and other civil rights issues either remain silent of fight for Israel AS A JEWISH STATE. They aren’t civil rights activists at all, they are Jewish supremacists!
Don’t really see what all the rush to date jew chicks is. I mean, they rarely know how to give head properly, are a bit dead in bed, and full of incessant chatter. Seriously, leave the female kikes to the rest of the hebe’s. It’s no big loss.
sounds very similiar to old time kkk practices against blacks in american past…does anyone really think these zionists arent racists. come on put on your black boots and brown shirts and head on out to the roadblock for some fun
This is a terrible idea! Can’t you all see the potential chaos this can cause? Unscrupulous people will be informing on Jewish girls who are NOT seeing Arab men, the names of Arab men will be given who are NOT seeing Jewish girls, just to harass one’s enemies! What a novel idea to mess with some poor girl who turned you down for a date.
The article doesn’t mention that even “true’ jews – ie. semitic Sephardic Jews are looked down upon as marriage partners for the Israeli Ashkenazi jews and are treated as second class citizens in their own annexed land.
not racist as a whole