Israeli Labour’s Former Leader Isaac Herzog Calls Mixed Marriages ‘A Plague’
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When confronted with the charge that the IHRA definition prevents criticism of Israeli Apartheid, its defenders point to the preamble which states: ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’
The problem though is that Israel is not like any other country. It is an ethno-nationalist or ethno-racial state. It is a state based on Jewish racial supremacy. Nothing better exemplifies this than the question of mixed marriages.
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| Lucy Aharish an Arab TV presenter is accused of seducing a 'Jewish soul' by marrying and Tsahi Halevi |
In recent days Israel has been convulsed with the news that TV Anchor woman, Lucy Aharish, who is an Arab, and Tsahi Halevi, the star of a TV series ‘Fauda’ tied the knot. Israel likes to pretend that it is just another western state but where in Europe today would you get government ministers commenting on the fact that two people of different religions or ethnicities had got married?
This is exactly what happened in Israel when news of Aharish and Halevi’s marriage became public knowledge. Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, who spent seven years in prison for fraud and then reassumed the same government position soon after his release, statedthat
"This is not the right thing to do.… The pain of assimilation around the world is destroying the Jewish nation."
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| Oren Hazan - Likud's racist and abusive MK |
Oren Hazan, a Likud backbencher who denies allegations that he smoked crystal meth and was a pimp while running a casino in Bulgaria, suggested that Halevi had been "Islamized,":
“I don't blame Lucy Aharish for seducing a Jewish soul. She didn't have the goal of harming our nation and preventing future Jewish children,”
In the United States, which has a Jewish population of over 5 million, intermarriage is the norm. Some 70% of Jews marry non-Jews.
Of course it is still a taboo, especially amongst the Orthodox in the diaspora for a Jew to marry a non-Jew. That is religious chauvinism. The same used to be true when Catholics married Protestants. It didn’t however have racial connotations because there are no Catholic, Protestant or Jewish states in the West.
To HaLevi, he wrote, “You’ve taken 'Fauda' a step too far. Step out of this film, man!” Hazan is known as a particularly racist individual, even for Israeli MKs. He was earlier this year suspended from the Knesset for 6 months. But Aryeh Deri, the Interior Minister also went on record as declaring that:
“They are a couple in love, so they are getting married. But it is not the right thing to do. But I say to her, ‘You will have children, and they will have a problem in Israel because of their status.’ We must not encourage these kinds of things. We must protect the Jewish people. If she is sincerely interested in Judaism, there is a conversion process.”
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| Members of the Jewish Nazi Lehava group give the Hitler salute outside the wedding of a Jew and Arab |
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| In which other 'democracy' would hundreds of people demonstrate against a wedding between a Jew and non-Jew? Given the demonisation of Hamas for it to be considered worse than Hamas rockets speaks volumes |
The head of Yesh Atid, the so-called centre party, Yair Lapid, a party which has waged a long political battle against religious coercion in Israel nevertheless said in a radio interview
“I have a problem with mixed marriages. Jews are a small people. There are fewer Jews in the world today than there were at the time of the Holocaust. I want the Jewish people to grow, not shrink.”
Although some Israeli MKs, conscious of the bad publicity, are supporting the couple against the barrage of criticism, the fact is that there is a Zionist consensus across the political spectrum against mixed marriages. For example it was reported Municipality will locate girls going out with men from minoritiesthat:
The youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality set up today a special team to assist young girls in the habit of mingling with men from minorities | EinavYossef-Zada, Ynet 14.09.09
It was reported that a special team in the youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality would locate [Jewish] girls in the habit of meeting with men from minorities and will assist them. The decision comes after a relationship was discovered between a girl from the city and minority men from Jaljulyawho murdered Arik Karp last month on a Tel Aviv beach. If you marry a Jew, the State will come and get you
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| The Arab couple - Mahmoud and Morel |
The chief of the youth department, Moshe Spektor, explained that
“The problem of minority men is well-known. Our attempts to deal with this problem are real and sincere. The municipality is making an effort to examine the matter in cooperation with the police.” Israel's vile anti-miscegenation squads, Seth Freedman
In Israel steps up its war on mixed marriages, Israeli journalist David Sheen wrote how, in 2015, Israel’s Education Ministry, headed by the leader of the far-Right Jewish Home, Naftali Bennett, removed Borderlife, a story about a romance between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man from the High School English syllabus. In 2016, it removed Trumpet in the Wadi, about a romance between a Jewish man and a Palestinian woman.
Among the reasons given by the Education Ministry were that ‘“intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity”. Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry official explained that:
“Adolescent youth tend to romanticise and don’t have, in many cases, the systematic point of view that includes considerations about preserving the identity of the nation and the significance of assimilation,”
When Zionist officials talk about the ‘identity of the nation’ what they mean is the racial identity of Israeli Jews. It is the same set of ideas that speaks to the fears of the demographic question, that too many Arabs will be born in the night and thus threaten the State’s Jewish majority. See e.g. Ex-Mossad chief warns of ‘demographic threat’
The opposition to mixed marriages and interracial relationships i.e. miscegenation (an ugly word that originated with the Deep South in America) is common throughout the Israeli political spectrum.
In her capacity as chair of the Status of Women Committee in the Knesset in 2011, Tzipi Hotoveli, now the Deputy Foreign Minister, invited the racist Lehava into the Knesset to explain how they prevent romantic contacts between Jews and Arabs. Hotovely explained how it was "important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages, and Lehava members are the right people for that,". World May Find Israel's New Deputy Foreign Minister Hard to Swallow
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism also holds that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic but that doesn’t stop Israelis making the comparison! In June 2016, Naftali Bennett tolda committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that the marriage of Jews to non-Jews in modern times is a disaster on par with four other tragedies of Jewish history, including the Nazi Holocaust.
Five months later, two young Israelis beat to death Sudanese asylum-seeker Babikir Adham-Uvdo in a Tel Aviv suburb because, as a non-Jewish Black man, he had stopped to talk to a group of young Israeli Jewish women. The killers crushed his face so badly that his own brother was unable to recognize him.
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It was the same mentality, of preserving the racial borders, that led an Israeli court to sentence Sabbar Kashur, a young Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, to 18 months in prison for “rape by deception.”
The deception consisted of Kashur telling the Israeli Jewish woman that he was Jewish. When she found out that he had lied to her, she went to the police. The sex was consensual, it was just that she was a racist. Imagine if a guy had lied that he was wealthy in order to persuade a girl to have sex with him. Would he too have been prosecuted for rape by deception?
In the East Jerusalem “neighborhood” (settlement) of Pisgat Ze’ev, a group of men who call themselves "Fire for Judaism” 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 ‘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. In Israel, Miscegenation Equals Rape
Kiryat Gat has a state-sanctioned anti-miscegenation programme whose sole aim is preventing Jewish girls from becoming romantically involved with Israeli Bedouin. The programme enjoys the support of the municipality and the police, and is headed by Kiryat Gat's welfare representative, who goes to schools to warn girls of the "exploitative Arabs". The programme uses a video entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy," which features a local police officer and a woman from the Anti-Assimilation Department, a wing of the religious organisation Yad L'ahim, which works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men. Israel's vile anti-miscegenation squads, Seth Freedman
In August 2014 a Jewish-Arab couple, Morel Malka and Mahmoud Mansour, tied the knot and got married. Because there is no civil weddings in Israel, precisely in order to prevent such marriages, Morel converted to Islam and was married in an Islamic ceremony. Their wedding ceremony was the subject of a demonstration by hundreds of far-Right protestors from Lehava, a fascist organisation headed by a Benzi Gopstein. Lehava has a ‘charitable’ wing Hemla. A Strange Kind of Mercy , Ha’aretz, 20.5.11. Extremists' Hatred Poisons Mahmoud and Morel's Wedding
The demonstrator screamed “An Arab is a son of a bitch” and “Haneen Zoabi [an outspoken Arab member of the Knesset] is a whore.”
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But it isn’t just the Right which fights against ‘assimilation’. The former leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Isaac Herzog, in an interview on Israeli TV described intermarriage between American Jews and non-Jews as a “plague” for which he seeks to find a “solution”. Israeli left leader says intermarriage by U.S. Jews is a plague, Jonathan Ofir.
Herzog is the outgoing leader of the Israeli political “left,” the Zionist Camp coalition, and the new chairman of the Jewish Agency, which seeks to strengthen bonds between Jews worldwide.
I’ll tell you a personal story. Last summer I traveled to the USA for a vacation.... And we went to meet friends. I have a ton of friends in the U.S.A. And I encountered something that I called an actual plague. I saw my friends’ children married or coupled with non-Jewish partners! And the parents beat their breasts and ask questions, and are suffering. Listen, it’s every [Jewish] family in the U.S.A.! And we are talking about millions. And I said there must be a campaign, a solution. We have to rack our brains to figure out how to solve this great challenge.
Most people when they think of plagues think of contagious diseases and illness such as bubonic plague or the Black Death. Not marriage between 2 people of a different religious/racial background. But of course Herzog is an expert on love. He has warned that his party must not be seen as “Arab-lovers.”
The intermarriage rate among American Jews is 58 percent, but 71 percent among the non-Orthodox. The young are making these choices voluntarily. Herzog’s anti-intermarriage stance is shared within the Zionist community: notably by Dennis Ross, former White House negotiator who co-chairs the Jewish People Policy Institute.
Because for Zionists, mixed marriage is not so much a religious as a racial/national matter. Race in Israel is defined by religion, hence why inter-marriage is not so much considered a sin as a form of treason. That was what an opinion poll found in Yediot Aharanot. Over half Israeli Jews believe that marriage is ‘national treason’. ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’