Kingdom of Olives and Ash by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

On August 17, 2014, shortly after Write Down, I am an Arab was released, twenty-six-year-old Mahmoud Mansour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, married twenty-three-year-old Morel Malka, a Jewish convert to Islam. Religious intermarriage is not recognized by the state of Israel; were Malka a Jewish Israeli and not a Muslim convert, her marriage to Mansour would have been invalid. Still, the union offended the right-wing Israeli organization LEHAVA, its name a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land.” In early August, LEHAVA published Mansour and Malka’s wedding invitation on its Facebook page, urging antiassimilation demonstrators to storm the banquet hall with banners and megaphones. Fearing for their safety, the couple sought a court order banning protestors from their wedding. They succeeded only in obtaining an order that barred demonstrators from coming within two hundred meters of the celebration. Hundreds of police were deployed to prevent violent confrontations between antiassimilation protestors and counterdemonstrators: hundreds of the former, dozens of the latter. Malka’s father refused to attend his daughter’s wedding, while LEHAVA’s chairman accused her of “marrying the enemy.”

It is on these grounds—that Jewish women who date Arab men are betraying the state—that LEHAVA created its infamous hotline in 2013. The telephone service, intended to “save the daughters of Israel,” allowed anonymous citizens to expose Jewish women suspected of dating Arab men. A recorded message offered callers three options: “If you are in contact with a goy and need assistance, press one. If you know a girl who is involved with a goy and you want to help her, press two. If you know of a goy who masquerades as a Jew or is harassing Jewish women, or of locations where there is an assimilation problem, press three.” While goy is a derogatory term for any non-Jewish man, LEHAVA makes clear that Arab men are the danger—a view commonly aired in conservative circles. A week after our night out, one of my companions in Ramallah sends me a link to a skit from a right-wing satirical program on Israel’s Channel 1. The two-minute video begins with an Israeli American woman introducing herself as Chloe and cheerfully describing Amir, the Arab man she’s just begun dating. The five ensuing sequences depict the stages of Chloe’s relationship, as the bubbly Israeli goes from wearing a minidress and holding a beer to: (1) wearing a long dress and drinking water; (2) wearing a headscarf and holding cooking pots; (3) wearing a full abaya and holding a baby; (4) wearing a niqab and holding several babies; (5) being absent. She has been killed. The iconography recalls the visual language of the antebellum South, where African American men were considered (and murdered for being) a threat to “pure” white women. In the Israeli antiassimilation narrative, it is not the Arab man’s body that threatens to annihilate, but his culture: oppressively patriarchal and inherently violent. Though the aforementioned hotline no longer exists, LEHAVA’s website still offers visitors the opportunity to “report cases of assimilation.” According to

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