Representations of Inter-Faith Couples: “Inevitable Violence” and the Israeli Arab Conflict

Abstract

In recent years there is a growing concern amongst Israeli Jewish-religious sectors in relation to Jewish-Arab couples whose number is supposedly on the rise. In this article, I will analyze three key representations of such Jewish-Arab couples, all written, published, or performed within Jewish religious sectors. These representations portray the relations of such couples as following an almost identical trajectory, from an optimistic beginning to a tragic and violent end. They expose a Jewish religious explanatory model for these relations and their assumed inevitable failure, which is disguised by non-religious, behavioral, social, and cultural terminology, to convince wider audiences, including secular ones, to avoid them. This model exploits as well as feeds into a wider contemporary representations of Muslim men and culture as violent. At the same time, the model exposes religious assumptions that are prominent also among many secular Israeli Jews, making this discourse appealing to wide sections of Jewish Israeli society.