From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 3:36 AM
Subject: What's in a name? In a racist society, everything
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
"In our society of course, refusal to contemplate a relationship with a person from another ethnic or religious background is described and denounced as racism or bigotry. In Israel it is now protected by law."
Israeli Feminists Debate Rape Charge
Arab Man Who Posed As Jewish Has Been Convicted
By Daniella Cheslow
Published July 28, 2010, issue of August 06, 2010.
Jerusalem — Feminist groups in Israel find themselves divided over a recent court ruling on rape that liberal groups condemn as tainted with racism.
GIL YOHANAN, YNETNEWS.COM
'Rape By Deception': Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old Arab man introduced himself as 'Dudu,' a common Jewish-Israeli name.
In the July 19 ruling, a married Arab father of two was found guilty of "rape-by-deception" for having sexual intercourse with a Jewish woman after introducing himself as a Jewish bachelor. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Even as others in Israel's community of progressive activists hastened to denounce the sentence, Merav Mor, a spokeswoman for the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, told Al-Jazeera International that she saw no trace of racism in the case.
"This was purely a case of a man giving false information in order to fraudulently coerce a woman into a sexual relationship," Mor said. "This has absolutely nothing to do with the Arab situation in Israel."
Mor is not alone. "This is rape because it wasn't informed consent," said Nurit Tsur, executive director of the Israel Women's Network. "She has the right to decide with whom she is having a one-night stand. If she was going into bed with him after five minutes and didn't ask, then she has no case. But if she asked, and he lied, then it is rape."
The case, Tsur conceded, "has a touch of racism," but ultimately, she said, the verdict was right.
The Israel Women's Network and the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel are both funded by the American-based New Israel Fund, a group whose grantees are often perceived as sharing a uniformly liberal political outlook. But among feminist groups — NIF funded or otherwise — reaction was anything but uniform in the wake of this verdict.
The convicted man, a 30-year-old Arab resident of East Jerusalem named Sabbar Kashur, was convicted of rape for lying to a woman he met in a downtown Jerusalem convenience store. He introduced himself as Dudu, a common name for Jewish Israelis, and said he was single. The woman testified that she told him she was looking for a Jewish man with whom she could have a long-term relationship. The couple went into a nearby building and made love on the roof. Later, the woman filed a police complaint for rape.
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The Jerusalem District Court ruled that although Kashur didn't rape her by the classic definition of the word, he is guilty of "rape by deception," because the woman would not have slept with him had she known his true identity.
"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," Judge Zvi Segal wrote.
"It smells of racism," said Ronit Ehrenfreund-Cohen, the Women's International Zionist Organization's director of the division for advancing the status of women, based in Tel Aviv.
Slava Greenberg, 26, a feminist activist from Haifa, said the case also discredits women.
"We fight for women, and that sexual offenders should go to jail, but this is a cheapening [of rape]," she told the Forward. "Already, people say, 'Oh, women call everything rape.' It's not that there aren't enough sexual attackers who are actually attackers, period. But there are all sorts of fears here of Arabs."
Kashur's case has even caused splits within organizations. ARCCI is the umbrella group for nine crisis centers nationwide and operates a 24-hour hot line. But while Mor defended the sentence, the head of the group that runs an ARCCI affiliated crisis center in the Arab city of Nazareth found it "impossible not to ask questions in this case."
"To give legitimacy to racist foundations and to see that racism get into the legal system — this is a very worrying and infuriating issue," said Aida Touma-Sliman, who also heads the Israeli group Women Against Violence, based in Nazareth.
This isn't the first time Israeli courts have invoked rape by deception. In 2008, High Court Judge Elyakim Rubinstein convicted Zvi Sleiman of the same offense for impersonating a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Housing. Sleiman seduced women with promises of free apartments and higher welfare payments. His case was a precedent; before it, men who lied their way into bed were convicted of fraud, such as a man posing as a neurosurgeon.
American legal blogger Eugene Volokh, a professor of constitutional law at University of California, Los Angeles, noted that "rape by deception" is a rare charge in the United States, other than a case in Tennessee in which a doctor was accused of rape for masturbating a patient under the guise of normal medical procedure.
But in Israel there is a broader context relating to the case's alleged racial dimension. Kashur's verdict arrives in the wake of a rash of initiatives — many of them government funded — aimed at keeping Arab men away from Jewish women. In February, the Tel Aviv Municipality launched a hotline for women involved with Arab men, with funding from the Ministry of Welfare in conjunction with the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption. In September, Petah Tikvah, a city about 20 minutes to the northeast, bankrolled a special patrol to break up mixed couples. In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze'ev, over the Green Line, vigilantes also drive to known couples' spots to end budding romances between Arab men and Jewish women.
After the verdict was handed down, liberal Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote about the court: "Don't they realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of 'don't touch our daughters'?" he wrote.
Dorit Abramovitch campaigns with several feminist organizations in Israel. Today there are more than 90, both Jewish and Arab, and they don't always share one view, she said.
"The national-racial wall exists unconsciously and consciously within the feminist field," she said.
Yet, within Israel's feminist movement there is also the beginning of a dialogue between Jews and Arabs about their differences. Two years ago, a national feminist conference was held for the first time in Arab Nazareth. Speeches were translated into Hebrew and Arabic, and participation was about 50-50 Jewish and Arab. Since then, Abramovitch said, Arab women have become more vocal on the common e-mail list of all the feminist groups.
"A very large percentage of Jewish feminist organizations have at least one project dealing with Arab women," she said. "Some of them have at least one Arab employee. It's quite new."
Since he was first accused in 2008, Kashur has been under house arrest at his mother-in-law's home. Kashur's lawyer, Adnan Aladdin, told CNN he would appeal.
Tsur said Kashur's case was "revolutionary."
"What will be interesting is what are consequences for future cases when someone says he is a bachelor when he is married if he is not an Arab," she said. "Every day, women and men lie to their partners about their marital status. I think this will be very long reaching."
Contact Daniella Cheslow at feedback@forward.com
What's in a name? In a racist society, everything
Richard Irvine, The Electronic Intifada, 29 July 2010
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| Israel's racist policies toward Palestinians have worrying historical precedents. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills) |
Names have always been political. Throughout history different regimes have used naming as a means of racial or religious identification. In Nazi Germany a 1938 law obliged Jews to add Sara or Israel to their names so as to eliminate ethnic confusion. And in my own country, Northern Ireland, even without a law, a name could determine one's success in life.
Until comparatively recently many Catholic families I know chose Protestant Anglicized names so as their children could have a chance of escaping the discrimination inherent in the sectarian state. It rarely worked however, as there were always other ways one could tell someone's background. Indeed, even today most of us immediately conduct a sort of scan upon meeting a new acquaintance. If we can't tell by name then we move on to other questions like, "Where do you live?" or the clincher -- in a society where schools are largely segregated -- "What school did you go to?" This approach is not always successful but most times we can quite quickly classify who we think our new acquaintance is and how much we can reveal of ourselves to them.
Sad though most of you must think this is, for people of my generation it is an automatic but unfortunate hangover from hundreds of years of mutual suspicion. Thankfully however, never did we have someone convicted for rape on the basis that the woman had mistaken her sexual partner as being of the same religious group as herself. This is what happened in an Israeli court last week.
For those unfamiliar with the case the story goes like this. A young Jewish Israeli woman and a young Palestinian Jerusalemite had consensual sex. Afterwards, the Jewish woman discovered that her partner was in fact not Jewish at all, but horror of horror, a Palestinian. But there was more, the Palestinian had called himself "Dudu," his nickname, but one most often used by Israeli Jews, and from this the young woman concluded she had been deliberately deceived and in fact raped.
In our society of course, refusal to contemplate a relationship with a person from another ethnic or religious background is described and denounced as racism or bigotry. In Israel it is now protected by law. The court found that indeed the young Jewish woman had in fact been raped, not by force of course, but by name. Finding the Palestinian guilty, district court Judge Zvi Segal stated, "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."
Sadly, this all has very worrying historical echoes. It hints back to the Apartheid and Jim Crow Laws which presupposed dangerous Blacks waiting to pounce on virginal Whites. It also conjures up the notorious images from the Nazi publication Der Sturmer of supposedly lecherous Jews trying to seduce young Aryan Germans, no doubt also at the unbearable price of the sanctity of their bodies and souls. In part it also shares the Nazi obsession with racial mixing and the naming policy Germany introduced to eliminate any possible confusion in ethnicity. Except perhaps Nazi policy was more honest. In the Nuremberg Laws Germany explicitly outlawed sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews; Israel does no such thing, it merely makes it a crime if sex takes place without the actors being fully aware of each other's background. Perhaps then Israel should take a leaf of out of Germany's 1938 naming law: every Muslim to have the name Muhammad attached; every Christian, Jesus. But it won't do that, after all, that is racist.
Richard Irvine teaches a course at Queen's University Belfast entitled "The Battle for Palestine" which explores the entire history of the conflict. Irvine has also worked voluntarily in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and taken part in olive planting and harvesting in the West Bank.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11432.shtml
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