Saturday September 26, 2009, 2:41 am
Israel once more proves the racist type of the what is so called "state of Israel".To end their occupation to the Palestinian,Syrian and lebaneese land ,they insist that Arabs must recognise ISRAEL as a "jwish state".They think they are smart to get this recognition and start driving Arab Israeli citizens out of the "jewish state of Israel"and to get rid of executing UN General assembly resolution number 194 that gives the right to Arabs who were forced by Israeli Terrorist gangs in 1948 to leave their homes and land and live in refugee camps in the neibouring Arab countries.Even the human /love /dating relationship is not supposed to take place for political reasons.Israel may look like a democratic state but the truth is it is a racist state able to survive by the US support not only by money (thousands of million dollars) from the pocket of American tax payers but also by military and political support.Such support must stop to force Israel to end the occpation for a Palestinian state with full control of it's terrtory or A DEMOCRATIC NON RACIST STATE IN ALL PALESTINE where Arabs,Christins ,Muslims and jews have equal rights.Israel is not ready for Peace because WAR or Arabsfobia is the only thing that unite Israelis.Once peace prevails Israel is going to disappear by its own.

Saturday September 26, 2009, 3:38 am
Well...time for a revival of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story in Israel, eh ?

I wouldn't be here today if my grandmother hadn't been willing to be shunned by her family for marrying the man she loved, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. Love cannot be stopped; never has any power been able to subdue it.

Meanwhile, even those who support the current Israeli right-wing regime should be wincing at this one.

Saturday September 26, 2009, 4:36 am
Comments on this story make me wince; and are extremely inflammatory.

This is NOT "official government policy". This is NOT "law". I have seen this SAME "encouragement" to "marry inside your own religion" in American Jews, and years ago. {Among Orthodox Jews. Not ALL Jews are Orthodox.} I am sure conservative Catholics, and some rigid Protestant sects, and non-Christian religions, also have strictures to "marry within your own religious group". And Mormons? If you saw "Fiddler on the Roof", about some Jewish villagers in 19th-century Russia, when one of Tevye's daughters married a Gentile, she was considered "dead" and no-one in the family was, according to their religious belief, supposed to speak to her. {But they did, anyway!}
In the novel and TV series "Brideshead Revisited", about an upper-class British Catholic family in the 1920's and '30's, marrying a non-Catholic was considered a SIN. And both these films reflected REAL-LIFE attitudes, very common at those times, and even now among some groups and sub-groups!

This is NOT "official", tho it may be un-official in some Orthodox Jewish communities. I imagine that Jewish communities segregate themselves, as to Orthodox, Conservative, etc., much like Mennonite or Amish communities might have their special customs in the U.S.

Jews are NOT a "racial group"; there is NO SUCH THING as "THE" Jew or "A" Jew, that applies to us ALL. {Yes, I am one of "THEM" -- and the product of a "mixed marriage", too!}

David, you have not done well; and the person presenting the article also did a disappointing job. It is indeed distressing to hear that there are vigilante groups in Jewish settlements using violence and threats and what amounts to kidnapping, to discourage interfaith and inter-nationality {inter-tribal?} dating. However, this has been presented in the most SENSATIONALIZED way; as if it was ALL JEWS who acted as vigilantes and approved of vigilantes.

It is like saying ALL Americans, without any exceptions, approved of LYNCHINGS in the South, just because we were "racially White"! This is the KIND OF THING that leads to hysteria and lack of perspective, on ALL sides of an issue. I keep hearing this Nazi-Aryan-Hitler-Master-Race bit, as if ONLY the Jews had it. Actually, MANY racial groups consider or considered themselves "the best"; and "Anglo-Saxons" have nothing to boast of in that regard! Also, WITHIN these groups, there are ALWAYS individuals, often many, who rise above that sort of stereotyping of their fellow-humans.

[The fact is, also, that Israel is to a large extent a THEOCRACY, where laws on marriage and divorce have to follow rabbinical decrees. This has been so since Israel's beginning. VERRRY inconvenient if you're outside that tradition. One reason you wouldn't want to live there; among others.]

Since I can't reach the person originally responsible for the article, and the chilling comments in response to it, I would at least ask Care2 members who read it, and this means you, too, David my friend, to take a temperate, balanced view of an explosive subject, and not get carried away by emotional exaggeration of it. Things are bad enuf the way they ARE; and don't have to be BUILT UPON into excessive DRAMATIZATION.
PEACE BE UNTO YOU; SHALOM; SALAAM.

Saturday September 26, 2009, 5:13 am
"However, this has been presented in the most SENSATIONALIZED way; as if it was ALL JEWS who acted as vigilantes and approved of vigilantes"...

I, nor anyone else, mentioned ALL JEWS Barbara, read it again?...But certainly enough to justify my posting this item?

Saturday September 26, 2009, 5:26 am
Just MORE THAN HALF OF THEM! (51+%?) Barbara...

Read on>>>>V
V
V

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.

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.

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OK?

Saturday September 26, 2009, 1:04 pm

Barbara, WELL SAID . . . Thank you!

Saturday September 26, 2009, 1:55 pm
Barbara, WELL SAID...Thank you!

"It is indeed distressing to hear that there are vigilante groups in Jewish settlements using violence and threats and what amounts to kidnapping, to discourage interfaith and inter-nationality {inter-tribal?} dating"

Saturday September 26, 2009, 6:49 pm
The intermarriage issue is not limited to Israel, of course. In Canada police sentenced an ethnic greek who tried to hire a mobster (undercover police officer) to kill his daughter's fiancee, because he didn't like the color of his skin.

The Israeli society comprises several communities which often live differently.

Druze will marry only inside the community. Arab girls will never be allowed by their families to marry Jewish men, under threat of death, sometimes actually executed. Religious will usually not marry non-religious. And the list goes on.

Though I am not a supporter of the described solution, the issue facing girls unfamiliar with the Arab culture is that they are often ignorant about the woman's role in Arabic family and they may end up trapped against their will and lose access to their children.

Only a week ago one Christian girl from the States was helped out of another Arab village, where her husband and his family hold her against her will and didn't let her talk to her parents. Israeli police cannot intervene in such cases, so the poor girls are on their own, with their children.

Saturday September 26, 2009, 11:39 pm
salaam-i can see how this could-cummulate in more killing of Arabs who are "caught" dating or have fallen in love with Israeli's...surely they will be punished by Israel....any excuse will do and love means nothing to zionists as the sacredness of life does not..

Sunday September 27, 2009, 1:44 pm
Aisha, if you wanted to marry a jew or anyone else outside your race or religion, what would happen to you? Unless you can get the man to convert to islam, you would be in dire staights which would most probably even lead to your death. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I'm not.

Sunday September 27, 2009, 1:48 pm
EEEkkk death??? Not good.....

Gorilly

Sunday September 27, 2009, 2:14 pm
BMutiny is correct, intermarriage is not mentioned one way or the other in Israeli law and you can find intermarriage bias across the religious spectrum as she points out, but also across the board in mankind's prejudices against creed, color, ehtniticity and social ranking. David Buchan suggests that just more than half of Israelis consider intermarriage 'national treason,' but doesn't that also mean almost half do not?

With that said, Palestinians, though they are muslim, are by blood more closely related to Jews than they are to Arabs, for both Palestinian and middle east Jew are semitic.

What BMutiny leaves off in her argument is that the state of Israel is very hostile to Palestinians and if they thought for one moment that the rest of the world would quit watching and turn their backs, Israel would annihilate the Palestinians creating another whole little holocaust, except that Jews would not be on the recieving end, but rather on the dishing out end.

I saw a PBS special where a Palestinain man donated his slain young son's internal vital organs to the critically ill. All the recipients were Jewish. One Jew although he accepted the organ anyway for his ailing child, he wished to God that it had been from a Jewish donor.

The point is, bias and prejudices bring on hate to the forefront and mankind is never going to have peace until he realizes we share a common origin as one, Jews and Palestinians included. If our original ancestors didn't realize this and cooperate when man's numbers were minute, we would not be here entertaining this argument.

We have devised plenty of manmade barriers to separate us (ie- borders, castes and religions) but tend to not dwell on the many facets in evolutionary terms of how alike we are from aspirations, emotion, smiles and tears. All these and a myriad more of traits we all share as explained in our grnomes and evolution.

Sunday September 27, 2009, 2:43 pm
Bruce, I don't know PBS special, but the organ donation program is well developed in both Israel and PA. Both peoples donate organs which are given to each other.

I can recall a story when a Palestinian got a donor's heart from a Jew and was killed by some Arab nationalists for becoming too much of a Jew. But that was an exception, not a rule.

Sunday September 27, 2009, 7:53 pm
I personally know of many cases where women married muslim men and were forced to convert to islam. When these marriages broke down, the women lost all contact with their children and were stuck in a religion they did not believe in in the first place. In the west they could apostate and revert to their previous faith (or not) but in muslim countries (including my country) to "murtad" (apostasy) WILL get you arrested and send to a faith rehabilitation centre until you recant your "murtad" and when you die, the religious authorities actually snatches your corps and buries it according to muslim rights. Many families have been devastated by such actions. And no non-muslim can inherit from a muslim - often leaving widows/widowers and children penniless. Those are facts that need to be considered when discussing interfaith (muslim and non-mulim) marriages. Love is a wonderful emotion, and should brook racial and religious differences - but alas - it just is not so. Would any of you want to lose your child and maybe even grandchildren just to prove that you are tolerant people? I think not....