Young Israelis protest the ban on a Jewish-Arab love story with video of Jews and Muslims kissing

A new video shows six young Israeli couples — straight and gay — kissing for the first time: a response to the Israeli Education Ministry’s ban on Borderlife, a book featuring a Jewish-Arab love story.

By: Ruth Eglash The Washington Post, Published on Thu Jan 07 2016

JERUSALEM—How have Tel Aviv’s young liberals responded to a decision by Israel’s conservative, right-wing education minister to ban a novel about forbidden love between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim?

They’ve made a video of Israelis and Palestinian kissing each other.

Published online Thursday morning by the magazine Time Out Tel Aviv, the video shows six young couples — male, female, straight and gay — kissing for the first time. Some of the pairs were already friends, and others had never met before. (It’s a take on the Tatia Pilieva First Kiss2014 project First Kiss.)

Ironically, its almost impossible to tell who is Israeli and who is Palestinian in the video.

The provocative clip comes a week after it was revealed that Israel’s Education Ministry had disqualified Dorit Rabinyan’s book Borderlife from a list of recommended reading for an advanced high school literature course. Yet to be released in English, Borderlife is the story of an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Muslim man who meet in New York, fall in love and then part ways. She returns to Tel Aviv and he to Ramallah.

The Education Ministry said it banned the book from its literature list to maintain the “identity and heritage of students in every sector.” Ministry officials were worried that the “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity,” reported Israeli daily Haaretz, which broke the story.

Tsafrir Abayov / AP

The book "Borderlife" by Dorit Rabinyan, centre, was rejected by Israel's Education Ministry for inclusion in the high school curriculum, reportedly over concerns that it could encourage intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Some of Israel’s more liberal lawmakers criticized the move, calling it racist and a gross attempt at censorship.

 

“Censorship started long ago. Now it aims to preserve the purity of blood,” wrote Knesset member Tamar Zandberg on Twitter.

Some high school teachers said they would use the book in class regardless, and bookstores countrywide reported a sudden increase in sales of Borderlife.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, responded that he strongly supported the ban mostly because the book criticizes Israeli soldiers, presenting them as war criminals.

But, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News, Bennett said: “Do we really need a book that talks about the romance between a Palestinian prisoner and a Jewish woman?” Bennett admitted that he had not yet read the book.

Nof Nathanson, deputy editor of Time Out Tel Aviv, explained the decision to make the video: “When the story came out last Thursday we were already working on another big project. But during our editorial meeting this week we decided that we needed to take action against this decision. We immediately started working on the video.”

Nathanson said the video had already gone viral. So far, he said, it had received mixed reviews, with positive comments on Time Out Tel Aviv’s Facebook page and some expressing shock at confronting such a taboo subject in this way.