Marriage between Jews and Arabs were never a real political issue in Israel. Rabbi Meir Kahane once tried to introduce laws banning sexual relations between Jews and none-Jews and was thrown out of the Knesset. At the time, Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar wrote that Kahane’s actions and ideas remind “the worst harms that were imposed upon our people.”
Recently, the racist plans of Rabbi Kahane are infiltrating the Israeli mainstream. Now The Jerusalem Post’s editorial (!) refers to “the dangers of intermarriage” as a pretext for its support of the new Knesset bill allowing ethnically segregated communities (my bold):
ISRAEL IS the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Only here can they enjoy the advantages of living in a state whose language, holidays and national symbols are their own. And while Jews are the majority in Israel, they are a small minority in a hostile region. In contrast, Arab Israelis, who make up a (large) minority in Israel, belong to an overwhelming majority in the region.
In this state of affairs Jewish Israelis, including the secular majority, should have the right to live in a community where they are not threatened by intermarriage or by becoming a cultural or religious minority.
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Read more on the ethnic segregation bill from +972 magazine bloggers here. And here is an excellent analysis (in Hebrew) of the political meaning of recent calls “to protect Jewish girls” (from Arabs).
