Many Israelis have objected to Jewish-Palestinian unions, claiming it diminishes the ranks of Jews
1948 areas: A wedding party of a Jewish woman and Palestinian man in the 1948 areas was nearly stormed by 200 far-right Israeli protesters on Sunday night.
Israeli police had to form human chains to keep protesters from breaking down the wedding hall’s gates.
A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both
from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court
order to bar the protest.
He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 metres (yards)
from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
The protest highlighted an increasing hatred for Palestinians by
Israelis. A group called Lehava, which organised the wedding
demonstration, has harassed Jewish-Palestinian couples in the past,
often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage.
But they have rarely protested at the site of a wedding. The groom told
Israel’s Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or
dampen its spirit. “We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up.
We favour coexistence,” he said.
Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced
Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as
a “traitor against the Jewish state,” and shouted epithets of hatred
towards Palestinians including “death to the Arabs.”
They sang a song that urges, “May your village burn down.” A few dozen
left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers,
balloons and a sign that read: “Love conquers all.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, sworn in last month to succeed Shimon
Peres, criticised the protest as a “cause for outrage and concern” in a
message on his Facebook page.
“Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here, in
Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic,” Rivlin, a member
of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud bloc, said.
Lehava spokesman and former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari denounced Jews
intermarrying with non-Jews of any denomination as “worse than what
Hitler did,” alluding to the murder of 6 million Jews across Europe in
World War Two.
A surprise wedding guest was Israel’s health minister, Yael German, a
centrist in Netanyahu’s government. She told reporters as she headed
inside that she saw the wedding and the protest against it as “an
expression of democracy.”
Palestinians make up about 20 percent of Israel’s majority Jewish
population, and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslims.
Rabbinical authorities who oversee most Jewish nuptials in Israel
object to intermarriage fearing it will diminish the ranks of the Jewish
people.
Many Israeli couples who marry out of their faith do so abroad.
Malka’s father, Yoram Malka, said on Israeli television he objected to
the wedding, calling it “a very sad event.” He said he was angry that
his daughter had converted to Islam.
Of his now son-in-law, he said, “My problem with him is that he is an Arab.”
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