For sleeping with a Jewish woman an Arab man goes to jail:
Saber Kushour apologises as he asks his guests to move the plastic chairs on his breeze-block balcony a little closer to the door to his house. If he were to sit where they are now, he explains, the electronic tag attached to his ankle would set off an alarm. Kushour's edginess is understandable – he is recalling a 15-minute encounter almost two years ago which he says "has destroyed my life". Last week the married father of two from east Jerusalem was sentenced to 18 months in jail for the "rape by deception" of a Jewish woman who claimed she would not have had sex with him had she known he was an Arab.
What might have been a tawdry episode – casting neither Kushour nor the woman in a favourable light – exploded into a debate in Israel about racism, sexual mores and justice. "I am paying the price for a mistake that she made," Kushour, 30, told the Observer. "I was shocked at the sentence – it shows a very vivid and clear racism." The message from the judge, he says, was that "because you are an Arab and you didn't make that clear, we are going to punish you". In his verdict, Judge Zvi Segal conceded that it was not "a classical rape by force". He added: "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated. The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls." At his home in Sharafat, where he is confined while awaiting an appeal, Kushour tells a different story. The woman has not been identified and has not gone public with her account.
Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews:
Ezra held [mixed-marriages] to be a terrible sin. For the Judean or Israelitish race was in his eyes a holy one, and suffered desecration by mingling with foreign tribes, even though they had abjured idolatry...That moment was to decide the fate of the Judean people, Ezra, and those who thought as he did, raised a wall of separation between the Judeans and the rest of the world.
Simon Dubnow, History of the World-People:
These mixed marriages, customary alike among the humble and the great, jeopardized the purity of the of the race and the religion. The national culture of the Judahite people was not yet strong enough to absorb alien elements without their leaving a trace. During this period when it was constructing its habitation, it needed national isolation so as not to disappear among the nations, and so that Judaism would not become one of the numerous religious cults in the East, which lacked all universal value and were ultimately washed away in the deluge if history.
From The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand. That's the progression of Zionism. Dies hard. But still, seriously: don't we want to kill it?
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It’s shocking that a part of the Jewish people, the latter having suffered the ultimate lethal consequences of anti-Jewish racism, now resort to what is indeed Nuremberg-style tribalism and protection of the ‘Jewish race’…
But perhaps it’s not: this is Zionism after all. Too many non-Israeli Jews seem to tacitly agree with it though…
It is a tragic farce indeed, tho even more unfortunate is that this sort fast flip-flop of a victim turning into a victimizer isn’t even exclusive to colonial movements like Zionism.
When Mali received independence from France, the next thing on the agenda was hounding down the nomad Tuaregs in the northern region, as Morocco and Algeria received independence from France the Moroccans went right ahead and opened a border war with its otherwise new natural ally, when the Greeks were granted independence from Turkey they began a systematic process of banishing non-orthodox Christians who lived there for hundreds if not thousands of years.
So this type of flip-floping isn’t special behavior, just part of the loopiness of history.