NAZARETH // 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, 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 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.
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.
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