The Arab-Jewish dating divide: thoughts on relationships, ethnic identity, and pluralism

Earlier this year, a story came out of Israel of a Palestinian man accused of "rape by deception" after having consensual sex with a woman who believed him to be a Jew. According to different news reports the man denied misrepresenting himself. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison in a plea bargain.

The story appears to have come down to a classic case of he-said/she-said:

According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where [Saber] Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left. When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault. Although Kashur was initially charged with rape and indecent assault, this was changed to a charge of rape by deception as part of a plea bargain arrangement. Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not "a classical rape by force," the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish. The sex therefore was obtained under false pretences, the judges said. "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated," they added.

Remember, the Palestinian man denied misrepresenting himself as a Jew; he is currently appealing the sentence. One of the judges on the case, Tzvi Segal, asserted somewhat ridiculously: "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. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims – actual and potential – to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price."


I would contend with Segal: In that case if a man lies to a woman about loving her and she sleeps with him and he leaves her after is that rape by deception? If a man lies about his profession or misrepresents his income to get women to sleep with him is that also rape by deception? If the man promises the moon and the stars to bed a woman and doesn't deliver can a woman bring that to court as rape by deception?

I don't know the exact details of the case, what evidence was offered or if there was any evidence presented. My opinion is this entire case is moot and should have been dismissed. The politics of the case, the bias through which the judges were ruling on it was the fact that the man in question was Arab and the woman Jewish and therefore a "victim." If these judges lived up to the standard of justice that the philosophy of law required of them they should have been blind to the ethnic identities of both parties and ruled according to the facts of the case which to any outside viewer is clearly absurd. The ruling concerned itself more with symbolic politics than with any ounce of common sense.

Dating across cultural, racial and religious divides is still a touchy subject even in the most modern countries. I don't mean to pick on Israel specifically, but given the political nature of Jewish identity, that of individual and state, it makes it an interesting case on the interracial dating divide. In that the character of the state identifies itself as Jewish; that the apparent "demographic threat" of low Israeli birthrates places pressure on the government to give Jewish women incentives to start families; that in essence woman is constructed as being symbolic of the nation and its future: relationships between Arab men and Jewish women are taboo not simply for political and religious reasons but on symbolically national-cultural grounds.

In a community in Nazareth, a special team has been established by the local authority to prevent Arab-Jewish dating relationships and "rescue" women from Arab men. Other privately-funded groups have also sprung up for the same purpose. This is a radical intervention of local government and very conservative communities in the private lives of individuals. A 2007 poll claimed that nearly half of Israeli-Jews believed that interracial relationships amounted to "national treason." As of today, there is no such thing as civil marriage in Israel, the status quo being that marriage is relegated to the individual religious communities. There are no provisions for gay marriage or interfaith marriages.

As an aside, I don't think early political philosophers foresaw democracies based on the cultural character of the nation, that culture would define the state or that public policy, or even justice, would be meted out and informed through a cultural lens and the problems it would engender. Where individual identity, taken collectively, defines these governments often any claims to minority protections are marginalized or even ignored in the face of bias or even blatant racism. There's a wide gap between what's in the law books and what happens in practice due to social and cultural norms.

I question anyone's interference in the private lives of individuals, especially in matters of love and marriage. The desperate necessity to preserve identity at the expense of humanness or greater interaction between different groups is willful ignorance at worse and paranoia at best. Anyone who claims that ethnic identity is eradicated due to intermarriage or "miscegenation" also fails to appreciate the complexity of individual identity and the fact that identities can be transformed and multiple identities acknowledged and that's not necessarily a negative thing. Perhaps global conflicts would be readily resolved through the establishment of more pluralist institutions so that petty conflicts which arise over something as absurd as dating or intermarriage don't have to be the reflection of the general absurdity of greater political conflicts.