Bad news from Israel
I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, and can’t get it out of my mind. Sheera Frenkel reports:
FRENKEL: Every night, David, who asked not to be called by his real name, patrols this and other neighboring Jewish settlements. His mission is to find Arab-Jewish couples and break up their dates.
DAVID: (Through translator) My heart hurts every time I see a Jewish girl with an Arab. It’s extremely upsetting. I asked myself: How did we get to this situation? How did we descend to this level? It is a serious step backwards, in our eyes.
FRENKEL: David is the leader of a group of vigilantes that goes by several names, including Fire For Judaism and Love of Youth. They say they number between 30 and 40 men and patrol the streets each night. Officially, they’re on the lookout for any mixed couples, but T.S.(ph) a member of the group who often serves as David’s driver, says the problem lies solely with Arab men dating Jewish girls.
This is terrifying and unbelievable. Perhaps you, like me, have been lulled into complacency thinking that the days of Jim Crow laws and the like are behind us as a species, but this is happening today, in a modern democracy. Now, there will always be some crazy isolationist fringe groups out there, and many people certainly do disapprove of their own children dating outside of their own culture or religion. It’s not hard to imagine that a couple people would feel so motivated as to walk around outside and yell some threatening things. Some people are jerks. But while this isn’t Jim Crow, it’s happening on a large scale. In Pisgat Ze’ev alone, there are apparently around three dozen men on patrol every night, and this is happening in many other cities as well. According to NPR, at least one of those cities possesses a government-run dating patrol, not vigilantes. This is serious.
On another level, this terrifies me because the Jews I know are American Jews, and I think that the result (in the US at least) of years of oppression and minority status is that Jews are particularly aware of the importance of protecting minority rights and personal freedoms. Somehow, it seems that if anyone would understand the danger of society embracing an ideology like that of these dating patrols, it ought to be the citizens of the Jewish state.
I haven’t been able to find any evidence that any high government officials in Israel have come out opposing these patrolling mobs, or of police crackdowns against them. I hope they get their act together on this soon.
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I agree. This kind of ethnicism is disturbing, to say the least.