Israeli police on Sunday blocked more than 200 far-right protesters shouting “death to the Arabs” from rushing guests at the wedding of a Jewish woman and a Muslim man, in a sign of rising tensions stoked by the Gaza war.
Several dozen police, including members of the force’s most elite units, formed human chains to keep protesters from the wedding hall’s gates and chased many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested; there were no injuries.
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 200m from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
Photo: Reuters
The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jewish and Arab Israelis over the past two months amid a month-long Gaza war, in part sparked by the kidnapping and slaying of three Israeli teens in June that was followed by the revenge choking and torching to death of a Palestinian teen near Jerusalem.
The Lehava group, which organized the wedding demonstration, has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage, but it has rarely protested at the site of a wedding.
Mansour told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that the protesters had failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit.
“We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favor coexistence,” the groom 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 toward Arabs, including “death to the Arabs.” They also sang a song that urges: “May your village burn down.”
A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counterprotest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: “Love conquers all.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Facebook criticized the protest as a “cause for outrage and concern.”
“Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here in Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic,” Rivlin, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party 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.”
A surprise wedding guest was Israeli Minister of Health 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.”
The bride’s father, Yoram Malka, said on Israeli TV that he objected to the wedding, calling it “a very sad event.”
He said he was angry over his daughter’s conversion and added of his son-in-law: “My problem with him is that he is an Arab.”
Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel’s majority Jewish population and the overwhelming majority of Arabs are Muslims.
Rabbinical authorities who oversee most Jewish nuptials in Israel object to intermarriage, fearing it will diminish the Jewish ranks. Many Israeli couples who marry out of their faith do so abroad.
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