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CONTACT: MADRE |
In Israel, Miscegenation Equals Rape
WASHINGTON - July 21 - On Monday, Sabbar Kashur, a young Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for something called “rape by deception.” Apparently, Mr. Kashur had consensual sex with a Jewish Israeli woman after assuring her that he was also Jewish. When she found out that he had lied to her, she went to the police.
Imagine living in a society where you can say, “I wish I had never slept with you. I’m going to the cops.” Only it’s not funny because Sabbar Kashur will probably go to jail for a year and a half. Meanwhile, efforts to combat actual sexual violence are undermined by a cynical distortion of the term rape. The real crime here, of course, is miscegenation.
Anyone from the US should recognize the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling for what it is: an anti-miscegenation measure on par with the now-defunct US laws against “race mixing” that were once used to uphold white supremacy. For most of us in the US, dating across race lines now seems about as edgy as wearing white after Labor Day. You can read Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class for a reminder of how white Americans’ obsession with “racial purity” was codified to keep African Americans and white women in their place. That’s the paradigm in which we should understand this case.
In the US, anti-miscegenation laws were on the books until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. That was the same year that Israel began its occupation of Sabbar Kashur’s home in East Jerusalem. Since then, Israelis have fine-tuned their own obsession with racial purity. Only they like to call it “national purity,” since Jewish privilege in Israel depends on maintaining the Jewish character of the state. In fact, race-mixing is perceived as such a threat that more than half of all Israeli Jews agree that Jewish-Arab intermarriage is a form of treason.
In the East Jerusalem “neighborhood” (it’s really a settlement) of Pisgat Ze’ev, a group of men who call themselves "Fire for Judaism” actually patrol the streets in the hopes of spotting and disrupting relationships between Jewish women and Palestinian men. The Israeli towns of Petah Tikva, Kiryat Gat and even super-liberal Tel Aviv have government-sponsored municipal programs to prevent miscegenation. The programs include psychological counseling for Jewish women who stray and a hotline for people to inform on Jewish women who date Palestinians.
The goal of this week’s court ruling (and of Israeli laws governing marriage, adoption and surrogacy) is to prevent Jews and Palestinians from forming intimate or family relationships. In the West Bank, this degree of separation is ensured by a giant concrete wall that runs through much of the territory. But where there is no wall, the state will rely on other forms of power to maintain strict separation between the two peoples of this land. By the way, the Afrikaans word for separation is Apartheid.
(This article was originally posted on the myMADRE blog.)
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Show AllI was incensed when I read this article in Ha'aretz the other day. The blatan racism, the hypocrisy, the abuse are intolerable. When I first read it, my though was: what if the man had been a jew, purported to be Arab and schmooze an Arab girl? Would the reaction been the same? The answer, of course, is obvious.
Reading it the second time, something else comes to mind. British Comedian Benny Hill had a skid on Charlie's Angels with him playing a woman (one of the angels) who is working as a Playboy Bunny while staking out someone at a club. The guy pulls her to the alley on back of the club where they had sex. The guy pays her with a big note which turns out to be counterfeit. Upon descovering this, the Benny Hill character starts to scream "rape! Rape! Help! I've been raped!" This story is exactly the same as that kid. The difference is that Benny Hill's skid was hysterically funny and this is hysterically tragic.
I am a liberal, but I have to disagree with the author of this article. Maybe they don't understand that the Jews are a tiny minority, and that the main religion that is accepted in Israel is Orthodox, whereas in America there are Orthodox, Ultra Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative strains of Judaism. There are also Ultra Orthodox Jews in Israel, but they exist in their own sphere.
Since this is the case, then just as in the past, the Jews want to maintain their culture and religion, and hence discourage things we might take for granted in the US or the west. It is not like apartheid.
The fact that the Arabs are at war with Israel makes it all the more galling.
Right. (NOT!) Jews are a TINY minority? Excuse me, but do you still live in the 1940s?
Okay, so the Jews "want to maintain their culture and religion" - I can accept that.
However, this grown woman CONSENTED TO SEX.
So he LIED.
Like MEN DON'T LIE for sex?
She needs to grow up and accept HER responsibility for HER part in this.
No, it is NOT rape. It is DECEPTION, nothing more, or less, and that's hardly legal grounds in a ONE NIGHT STAND, a TRICK, something that USED to be considered less-than-moral to engage in, something that USED to be considered as making a woman a TRAMP, a TART, a TROLLOP, a WHORE. Someone to NOT be admired.
Am I saying we should go back to THAT? NOT AT ALL.
But IF you are GOING to ENGAGE in CONSENSUAL sex as an ADULT then you HAVE to accept that there are RISKS including LYING, DECEPTION.
For God's sake, she didn't even KNOW this man. It's not as if they dated for months!
I cannot agree that such ethnic discrimination can be justified on the basis of religion. First, there are some religions or interpretations thereof that are racist. This is certainly true in Israel, where influential rabbis (see Israel's Fateful Hour, by Harkabi) talk about the holiness of Jewish DNA and the greater value of Jewish life.
Moreover, it is clear that in Israel religion is used as a pretext for racism; for example, the religious precepts against fornication and adultery are ignored, but those against miscegenation are scrupulously observed.
Whatever it may have been in the past, Jewish self-identity now, particularly in Israel, is overwhelmingly based on ancestry (despite few conversions that are grudgingly tolerated), and hence ethnic; and ethnic discrimination/exclusivity is every bit as obnoxious when done in favor of Jews as when against Jews. In any event it is certainly arrant hypocrisy to approve discrimination in only one direction.
All discrimination is defended by talk of "preserving" one's own "culture."
The founders of modern Zionism were not very religious; their nationalism derived from the blood-and-soil ideology common in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it persists in Israel today----hence the obsession over the "demographic problem."
Israel has never sought to solve this "problem" by conversion; rather, it has made conversion as difficult as possible.