REHOVOT, Israel — The nearby city of Petah Tikva is employing controversial tactics to reduce violence in the city among Jewish singles who date Arabs:
A special team unit of the City Youth Petah Tikva will find [Israeli] girls tend to see minorities and help them. It turned out against the bond between a local resident minorities from Julia, who murdered the late Eric Karp beach in Tel Aviv.
“The problem of minorities is familiar,” says the head of the youth unit, Moshe Spector, “attempts to deal with are real and honest. There are some problematic locations municipality makes an effort to examine the matter in cooperation with the police.”
Step taken as part of municipal engineering administration to prevent rental apartments, usually segmented, minorities residing in the city illegally (illegal aliens). “Independent and separate units are a danger,” said deputy mayor, Moti Zft (NRP), “they can be a source of vandalism and harassment…”
Zft estimated that hundreds of Arab youths, some areas and some Israeli Arabs live in the city center, in small apartments or split. The municipality recently published local newspapers ads, which warned the owners of the apartments illegally splitting prohibition and the prohibition accommodate illegal aliens.
Administration officials say the engineering will take additional preventative actions, including filing complaints with the police on the withholding of illegal aliens, a ban on publishing tables after 23:00 cafes which tend to concentrate on illegal aliens, as well as increasing the lighting in the city center, including City Hall parking lot.
The excerpt I quoted is from a Google translation; the English is not very good, but English-speakers will get the general idea. The original Hebrew is here.
This is a complex issue involving crime, ethnicity, poverty, religion, and civil liberties. I’ll try to parse it out.
First, as journalist Noam Sheizaf correctly notes, the city is using general, politically-correct terms like “minorities” when the unspoken meaning is “Arabs” and “Arab Israelis.” As I wrote in a prior Letter from Israel, people have no qualms about using terms that can be interpreted as discriminatory or even racist. Although seventy percent of the country’s population are Jews, all of them are still seen as — and called — Russians, Ethiopians, Americans, Anglos, Moroccans, Iraqis, Yemenites, Poles, and so on. Israelis, unfortunately, often make jokes referring to “stupid Americans,” “crazy Moroccans,” and “Russian whores.” If an Israeli citizen or government official wants to refer to Russian Jews, he will say, “Russians.” If he means Iraqi Jews, he will say, “Iraqis.” It is always specific. But out of political niceties, general terms like “minorities” always refer to Arabs. I wonder what Birthright Israel recent visitors and people on Christian Israel tours think about this.
In a nutshell, the municipality is going to track and try to help Israeli girls who date Arabs.*
Now, the reasons for this desire are generally two-fold. First, the rate of crimes committed within and by the Israeli-Arab community is larger than the national average. The reasons are debatable. Some Israelis say that Arabs are naturally aggressive and violent. Others say that the anger is repressed or outright hostility resulting from feelings of being occupied. The Arab community also has higher rates of poverty and lower levels of education — both factors statistically contribute to increased crime in general. Regardless of the reason for the increased amount of violence and crime, part of the municipality’s desire is to protect Israeli girls.
Another factor is the inherent tendency, developed over two-thousand years of life in exile, of Jews to encourage Jews to date and marry only other Jews. (If this had not occurred, the Jewish people might have died out through intermarriage and assimilation.) If the subtle reference to Arabs in the article were replaced with Christians or Buddhists or whomever, it would be no different in this specific context. So, the municipality is also trying to do legally and through the law what Jews had always done socially and through peer pressure.
But it is difficult to work around the inherent element of racism here. My hometown of Belleville, Illinois, in the United States is next to East St. Louis, a city striken with high levels of crime, violence, and vandalism. Most people there are black. I can only imagine the furor that would erupt if the city of Belleville began tracking white girls who date black people from East St. Louis in order to “protect them from crime.” But then again, the rules of daily life the Middle East are much different than those of the Western world. Analogies and comparisons are not always realistic and practical even if they are philosophically sound.
The core issue, it seems, is the ongoing debate between two competing priorities: the desire to have a democracy that ensures individual, civil liberties while being governed by the rule of law and the desire to have a Jewish state. (What exactly is a “Jewish state” is another complex issue entirely.) Here is one example: Should the State of Israel ban the sale of pork products? The former desire would say “no,” but the latter would say “yes.” There is no possibility of compromise.
The same conflict can also apply in this instance. Individuals in a free democracy are free to associate with whomever they want; citizens of a Jewish state would need to be less free (no pork, no Jews marrying Arabs, and such) in order to preserve the Jewish ethnoreligious character of the country. This article and municipal effort are just the latest examples of the ongoing drama over the recreation of the Jewish state and what exactly that will mean.
* One clarification: One of the articles linked below mentions another important detail: Many of the Israeli girls in question are non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have identity issues (non-Jews or so-called half-Jews in a Jewish state) and also come from broken homes. This is another motivation behind the desire to “help” them.
Elsewhere: The Jerusalem Post reports on this issue as well as on a group in Jerusalem that is trying to prevent Jewish-Arab dating.
