Israel’s Ministry of Education decided, for sound reasons, not to include in its syllabus a novel that glorifies a situation where an Arab man falls in love with a Jewish girl. The content and the way it was presented, not the literary style, was considered unsuitable for the Israeli school system. Advanced literature classes will be allowed to include it, but not the others.
The situation is all too common today and is far from glorious. Arab Muslim men, whose religious tradition allows them to have four wives, often pursue naive Israeli Jewish girls in Israel and succeed in bringing them to Arab villages to become one of those four “kept women” allowed by Islam. The girl involved often does not know her suitor is an Arab until she is embroiled in a relationship. Her family does not know until she disappears.
The bubble bursts when many of the girls' lives are controlled and prison-like, mothers-in-law and the other wives mistreat them, they live in deplorable conditions and the desire to raise their children keeps them unwilling prisoners.
All of us who studied social work in Israel learned the eminent text entitled The Mark of Cain, by criminologist Shlomo Shoham, which sensitized a generation of Israeli social work professionals to learn how a generation of Jewish girls from poverty stricken transit camps for immigrants in the 1950’s and 1960’s were offered work by Arab Muslim men in their nearby villages. It details how many Jewish girls became entrapped for life in Arab villages, where they are second class citizens in the Arab world and disgraced in the eyes of their Jewish families.
While these children of a Jewish mother were still Jewish halakhically, they were raised as Muslims unless the wife managed to escape.
As a result, as many as 50,000 Jewish children grew up in Israeli Muslim Arab homes.
Today, Jewish girls venture out in Israeli cities where there is a mixed Muslim-Jewish population - in Jerusalem, Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Nazareth Elite and Haifa - and it is hard to resist the charm of middle class Arab men who pose an attraction that a Jewish girl may have difficulty fending off. Much money is spent on the girl while she is being pursued, but the charm wears off soon after they are married, as those who have escaped have told.
There is an NGO that works to help these women escape if they wish to, but its work is clandestine and dangerous. Several years ago, a drama took place when a Jewish woman trapped in just such a marriage and living in Gaza escaped with her children. And some relationships work, although they are a tragedy to the Jewish family left behind forever. The problem is the young and inexperienced hgh school girls who might be encouraged by a book of this nature to think that there is no problem involved.
Seeing is believing. My office is located in downtown Jerusalem, where young people hang out. Working late nights, I find it easy to see how the new light rail in Jerusalem has brought an influx of young Arab fellows from Arab neighborhoods of Beit Hanina and Shuafat who hang out with Jewish teenage girls and develop relationships that may have tragic consequences in the not so distant future.
By not encouraging the use of a book which encourages Arab-Jewish romance , the Israel Ministry of Education conveys the idea that a “word to the wise is sufficient.” Romanticizing a situation that in reality, is fraught with difficulty, should not be an educational goal.