Banning sexual relations between a Jew and a non-Jew

A protest against the attack by a Jewish mob on three Palestinians in Zion Sq., Jerusalem. August 18, 2012 (photo: Activestills)

 There is one primary difference between Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 (i.e before the final solution began) and Apartheid South Africa and Israel.  Whereas the first two enacted legislation explicitly forbidding sexual relations between ‘races’, Israel prefers more informal methods.  Among Israeli Jews there is an overwhelming consensus against such relations. Jews who break this taboo are ostracised and there is a major campaign by the religious and settler right to prevent and if necessary  break-up such relations.  Because of the overwhelming racism in Israeli society, this is as effective as legislation in Germany and South Africa was.

Sabbar Kashur – imprisoned for rape by deception

As I reported at the time, an Arab male Sabbar Kashur, was given an 18 month prison sentence and held under house detention for two years for ‘impersonating a Jew’.   His offence?  Rape by deceit!  High Court frees Arab in case of ‘rape by impersonating Jew‘

 Now there is a good argument that someone carrying a transmittable disease (HIV, Hepatitis etc.) is under a positive duty to inform the woman (or man) of their condition and that such a failure means there was no genuine consent.  But only in Israel, is pretending to be of a different religion an offence  considered rape.  Kashur was freed by the Supreme Court after massive international pressure drew the same comparisons between Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa and Israel.

The Nuremberg Race Laws (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor). Germany, September 15, 1935.  — National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

As the articles below show, the pressure is immense on a Jewish woman not to have sex with an Arab (it doesn’t work the same way with a Jewish man – the same was true in Nazi Germany where Hitler had a much more tolerant attitude to relations between German men and Jewish women, because the racial gene pool was not affected).

As the Holocaust Encyclopedia’s article Anti-Jewish Legislation in Prewar Germany outlines:

‘At their annual party rally held in Nuremberg in September 1935, the Nazi leaders announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. These “Nuremberg Laws” excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or German-related blood.”

Israel racist?  Perish the thought.  After all, it’s the Middle East’s only democracy!

It should be noted that Orthodox Jews have always opposed such relations   with non-Jews.  When I grew up there was a taboo against ‘marrying-out’.  But many Jews did so and today in Britain and the USA a majority marry out.  But when the State and society enforce such medieval attitudes with the power of the state, then it becomes not chavinist but racist, a demonstration of a sick, racist society.  In Israel this opposition is not confined to the religious sector.  Naftali Bennett leads the settler  Jewish Home party which is secular and anti-religious.

Tony Greenstein

 
Racist Jews lead drive against ‘their’ women having sex with Palestinian men

Articles on the growth of the Jewish campaign against Jewish/Palestinian relations from Ma’an, Ha’aretz and +972.

Rabbi Dov Lior – “A Jewish fingernail is worth more than 1,000 non-Jewish lives” elected repeatedly to settler Yesha Rabbinical Council

The campaign against relationships, especially sexual, between Jewish women and Arab men is led by Lehava and, amongst others, Rabbi Dov Lior [above], notorious for his racist pronouncements including the proposals that Bedouin should be paid to move to ‘their homelands’ – Libya and Saudi Arabia.

By Ma’an news
October 20, 2013
BETHLEHEM — Jewish women have been banned from working night shifts as a part of their national service at hospitals in Israel in order to avoid “contact with Arabs,” Israeli Channel 10 reported on Wednesday.

Israeli National Service Administration Director Sar-Shalom Jerbi issued the directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9 p.m. for women fulfilling their national service duties.
The director explained that “we reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

Naftali Bennett is the leader of the far-right Israeli political party “Jewish Home,” and is currently the minister of religious services.

Many young Jewish women in Israel choose to volunteer at hospitals in order to fulfill their national service requirements. The national service is an alternative to service in the Israeli army, which is required for most Israeli Jews.

The decision marks a victory for an intense campaign led by religious Zionist rabbis and other right-wing groups within Israel to prevent contact of any sort between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, especially between Jewish women and Palestinian men.

A flyer warning the public about an Arab who threatens to “defame” Jewish girls, distributed in a Jerusalem neighborhood in 2011.

According to the Channel 10 report, these groups began a campaign against women’s night-time service last year after reports surfaced of “intimate relations” between some Jewish volunteers and Palestinian doctors at hospitals.

In response to the decision, the director of the Lehava organization which was involved in the campaign issued a statement lamenting that the move did not go far enough. “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are non-Jews,” he said.

Lehava is an Israeli organization that campaigns to prevent relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish men. The main targets of their campaigns tend to be Muslim and Christian Arabs.
Among the leaders of the campaign was Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlements who was in 2011 arrested for incitement against Arabs.

Lior has previously made numerous controversial and racist statements towards non-Jews, and called Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of Patriarchs massacre which claimed the lives of 29 Muslim worshipers, “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

Jewish girls, beware the ‘evil’ Arab doctor

How did sex, which is supposed to be an intimate matter between two adults, become the doomsday weapon of generations of racists of whatever nationality or religion?
By Oudeh Basharat, Ha’aretz October 21, 2013

Arab physicians have become the latest target of racism. Photo by Nimrod Glickman

If Channel 10 were to run a news item about a tomato that caused an upset stomach, Heaven forbid, the officials in charge would make sure to get a comment, if not from the tomato itself, then at least from the farmer who had grown it. But Arab physicians do not have this luxury.

Channel 10’s main news broadcast last Wednesday evening reported that the National Civilian Service Administration had ordered its religiously observant women volunteers not to work after 9 P.M. According to the news broadcast, this decision was made by the Lehava anti-assimilation organization after “reports were received about intimate relationships between young women performing their national service and Arab physicians in the hospitals where they volunteered,” as reported on the Nana 10 online portal. The website quoted one of the rabbis as having said in the past, “I’m hearing horrible stories about good girls.” The head of the National Civilian Service Administration made sure to mention that the decision was made with the blessing of the minister in charge, Naftali Bennett.

Channel 10 conveyed the news item with equanimity, as if it were a weather report. Nobody there bothered to invite an Arab physician, or at least the director of the hospital where these lewd acts are supposedly taking place, to give their version of events. In the Soviet Union, Stalin himself concocted the Doctors’ Plot against Jewish physicians. Today, all that’s necessary are a few racist rabbis, the director of the National Civilian Service Administration, brother Naftali and a major media outlet that forgets to ask for a response from the ones being maligned — and voila: a plot that would give the anti-Jewish propaganda industry since the Middle Ages something to be proud of.

After turning the Arabs into thieves, layabouts, non-tax-paying deadbeats and backstabbers, now the time has come to malign the Arab physicians. And they, the jewel in the crown, are portrayed as sexual deviants who go after helpless teenage girls. Well then, ladies and gentlemen, be careful when you walk around in the hospitals, because you never know where it’s going to come from: the hallways teeming with hormone-ridden physicians on the prowl. This is the Arab portrayed in the Israeli media. In situations like these, when any response pales next to the plot, the writer Emile Habibi would mutter, “Treacherous time.”

How did sex, which is supposed to be an intimate matter between two adults, become the doomsday weapon of generations of racists of whatever nationality or religion — a weapon that brings all the hidden demons of their sick souls out into the open? But if so, why punish the Jewish women doctors and nurses, who will become easy prey for all the hormonal attacks of the Arab doctors once the teenage girls doing their national service have left for the night? Well, Jewish physicians, get out of bed and go to work! Stand guard en masse during the night to maintain racial purity. And as for you, Arab physicians, here you go — finally, an evening with your families and a warm bed at night, just as long as you do not profane the modesty of the Arab girls.

All these good things, and the major festival of racism — the Knesset’s winter session — are still in store for us. If the media adopt the promotional methods customary on television, then it’s likely that we’ll be seeing promos before the Knesset’s hearings with the slogan “Racism not of this world” alongside a photograph of MK Ze’ev Elkin, for example. Or an announcer saying, “How to sweep the Arabs out of the Knesset,” while Deputy Minister Danny Danon is shown holding a large broom with the words “The Governance Bill” written on it. MK Yariv Levin will also appear with a similar broom, bearing the caption “The Prawer Bill,” while the announcer tells us, in formal tones, of “an eviction operation that will surpass the expulsion from Spain.”

Yil’an al-shaitan, as the Arabic saying goes — damned be the devil, who feeds the anger and despair that lie in wait o ambush the best of both peoples. Collaboration in this ugly phenomenon is so prevalent in Israeli society, Jews and Arabs alike, that it is hard to know who here is a Jew and who an Arab. Faced with this arid desolation of racism, the soil yearns for the blooming oases of normalization. Give normalization a chance!

Jewish women can’t volunteer at night – to avoid ‘contact with Arabs’

Benzi Gopstein – Member of the neo-Nazi Kach Organisation treated with respect by Knesset MPs

The Israeli government succumbs to pressure by racist and anti-miscegenation organizations, banning Jewish women from volunteering in hospitals at night, when they might be more likely to encounter Arab workers and doctors.
By Mairav Zonszein, +972
October 17, 2013

Young Israeli women volunteering at hospitals in Israel as part of their national service (an alternative to serving in the Israel Defense Forces) will no longer be allowed to do night shifts in order to avoid any contact with Arabs, Channel 10 reported Wednesday (Hebrew).

The director of Israel’s National Service Administration, Sar-Shalom Jerbi, issued a directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9:00 p.m.: “We reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

According to the report, the decision was made following a pressure campaign waged by religious Zionist rabbis, among them notorious Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior (arrested in 2011 for incitement against Arabs and for legitimizing the killing of non-Jews in war time) and the radical Israeli anti-miscegenation organizationLehava. They began the campaign over the last year after hearing reports of “intimate relations” between some of the Palestinian-Arab doctors and the Israeli Jewish volunteers.

The decision was not sharp enough for Lehava, however, according to a statement issued by its director: “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are goyim [non-Jews].”

Just last month, I reported on another anti-miscegenation religious organization Yad La’achim, which is collecting IDs of Jewish Israeli girls who are found socializing with Arabs.

The holy war against Arab-Jewish relations and the Jerusalem lynch

Those who attacked Palestinians in central Jerusalem [August 17th, 2012] claimed they wanted to prevent them from speaking to Jewish girls. The fear of interracial relations once found only in the fringes of the right are now turning into a legitimate, mainstream political issue in national-religious circles.
By Noam Sheizaf, +972 August 21, 2012

There are several organizations promoting ethnic segregation in Israel, with a special emphasis on preventing relations between Jewish girls and Palestinian men. The most vocal is Lehava, an NGO that calls upon citizens to inform them of any case of mixed marriage or relationship. Their low-tech internet site, filled with racism and hate-talk, has a section titled “shame page,” which features the pictures of women, mostly public figures, who are in relationships with non-Jews. The head of Lehava, a Kahanist called Bentzi Gopstein, said today that the Jerusalem attackers “have raised Jewish honor from the floor and did what the police should have done.”

Likud MP Tzipi Hotovely a racist who believes Netanyahu is too soft  supports annexing the West Bank but says it would mean offering Palestinians Israeli citizenship

Likud deputy transport minister Tzipi Hotovely; she presided over a 2011 Knesset hearing on ‘Jewish identity’ which centred on eradicating intimate relationships between Jews and Arabs.

Lehava wouldn’t merit much attention if it wasn’t for their legitimacy in right-wing circles. In February 2011, MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) invited Gopstein to a formal session of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women, along with other members of organizations who work to expose and prevent inter-racial relations. The title of the hearing was “the phenomena of assimilation in Israel – a special session in honor of Jewish Identity Day.”

Gopstein had the opportunity to explain the work of his organizations, and even to complain about “lack of cooperation” from the Ministry of Education; he mentioned the case of a school in Bat Yam “where 20 percent of the girls are dating Arabs.” MK Hotovely turned to a representative from the Department of Education, Dr. Zvi Zameret, for an explanation, and the latter, instead of calling racism for what it is, replied: “This is the first time I am hearing those figures… I made a note to look into that.”

A quote from Gopstein was the first one to appear in a press release that MK Hotovely sent following the session, and other Knesset members present at the debate congratulated her for tackling this issue.
The holy war against interracial relationships has been central to the agenda of racist groups throughout modern history. In many places, the first to suffer from attacks (and later, laws) were Jews. An attempt to introduce laws against intermarriage was the main reason the Knesset rejected Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane in the 1980s. At the time, Justice Shamgar wrote that such ideas “remind us of the worst persecution in Jewish history.”

Times have changed. The demand for racial purity is becoming mainstream, re-entering the Knesset through the front door. Leading rabbis, most of them state employees, have signed letters calling on Jewish homeowners to refrain from renting their apartments to Arabs, or warning Jewish girls against dating Arabs.

Michael Ben Ari – first disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane elected to the Knesset for the National Union

 Michael Ben-Ari joined a party of 50 right-wingers who travelled to a village last May to prevent a Jewish woman marrying an Arab man. The former MK said, “We came to say that the women of Israel belong to the Jewish people. Assimilation is one of the greatest tragedies of the Jewish people. Every Jew can sleep tonight while clicking his tongue, but he must know that another daughter of Israel has married an Arab.”

It’s a form of racism that treats women as the object of the (Jewish) man, his to keep within the tribe. It’s not surprising therefore that the calls to ban women from public life come from the same national-Orthodox circles who want to “save” those women from Palestinian men. But while the attempts to limit the presence of women in public are (rightly) meeting fierce opposition, the revolting attempts to delegitimize, ban or punish interracial relations are endorsed by not-so-marginal circles, and practically accepted as a legitimate political concern within the Jewish mainstream.

Newspaper reports from the Jews for Justice Weekly Reports