So much for tolerance: Israel bans Arab-Jewish romance novel for promoting interracial relationships

While Israeli anti-miscegenation groups threaten Arabs for relationships with Jews, books are banned in school

BEN NORTON

The Israeli government banned a romance novel depicting an interracial Jewish-Arab relationship from schools, according to reports in the Israeli media.

Israel’s education ministry ruled that the book “Gader Haya” (“Hedgegrow” in Hebrew, but translated into English as “Borderline”) cannot be used in high schools, claiming the love story threatens “the identity and the heritage of students in every sector.”

In the justification for its decision, education ministry officials insisted “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten the separate identity,” warning that “young people of adolescent age don’t have the systemic view that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation.”

Prominent right-wing Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva described the book as a “pro-assimilation novel.” “Assimilation” is often used by the Israeli right as a euphemism for miscegenation.

“Gader Haya” tells the story of an Israeli translator and a Palestinian artist who fall in love in New York. Their relationship later falls apart when the Palestinian man must return to Ramallah, a city in the West Bank, which has been under an illegal military occupation by Israel since 1967.

The book is not explicit; numerous education professionals and teachers insisted that it “is appropriate for students in the upper grades of high schools.” Israel’s education ministry banned it because of its portrayal of an interracial relationship.

Dalia Fenig, an education ministry official who pushed through the book banning, based her decision on the romance novel’s portrayal of interracial love. “The story is based on a romantic motif of impossible prohibited/secret love,” she said. “Intimate relations and certainly the open option of institutionalizing [a relationship] through marriage and having a family, even if it doesn’t come to fruition in the story, between Jews and non-Jews is perceived among large segments of society as a threat to a separate identity,” Fenig added.

Numerous Israeli officials condemned the book banning. Shlomo Herzig, the head of literature studies in Israel’s education ministry, told leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “The hasty use, as I see it, of the disqualification of a work of literature from the body of work approved for instruction and included in literature curriculum doesn’t seem acceptable to me.”

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/31/so_much_for_tolerance_israel_bans_arab_jewish_romance_novel_for_promoting_interracial_relationships/