Love in the time of racism: The new, dangerous low in the campaign to stop interracial relationships - Magazine - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
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Last September, five Jewish youths attacked an Arab man in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood. The Arab was escorting a female work colleague home and was attacked because he was suspected of “taking advantage of a Jewish woman,” according to the statements made to the police by three of the defendants.
A month before, in August 2012, Jewish teens mobbed and attacked a 20-year-old Arab man, seriously injuring him. The indictment in that case reveals that the young attackers in “Cat Square” in Jerusalem were inciting against Arabs and had announced that Arabs weren’t allowed to sit there, that any Arabs passing by should be beaten, and inflamed the atmosphere with cries of “Death to Arabs” and “Mohammed is dead.” Things heated up when a teenage girl who was with the Jewish boys told them that she was once raped, apparently by an Arab assailant. In response, the youths decided to beat a young Arab who happened to be passing by and with no connection whatsoever to the incident the girl had described.
These two lynching cases represent the peak of the racist incitement that has been steadily on the rise in recent years in Israel, centering largely on relationships between Jewish women and Arab men. A new report from the Israeli Religious Action Center on this specific brand of racism surveys and analyzes the phenomenon from a gender perspective, examining the main organizations that are concerned with “the honor of daughters of Israel,” keeping them away from Arab men and “saving” them from assimilation and mixed marriages.
“We noticed that when MK Meir Kahane claimed in the 1980s that Arab men were threatening to steal our wives and daughters, such statements were perceived as part of his extremist and taboo dogma, while today such statements are no longer a fringe phenomenon but becoming more and more common in the Israeli landscape,” says attorney Einat Hurvitz, the Israel Religious Action Center’s director of Legal and Public Advocacy. She is spearheading the center’s handling of the issue and initiated the report, which was authored by attorney Ruth Carmi.