REPORTER: Amos Roberts
A stretch limousine, lots of lace and tulle, tambourines... The wedding of Mahmoud Mansour and Morel Malka had all the usual Middle Eastern trappings. Plus - something the couple hadn't originally bargained on.
NEWSREADER (Translation): It was meant to be a private wedding but it has created a national storm for a week now because she is a Jew and he is an Arab. So there are those who oppose this wedding. Hundreds from the extreme right have been here for hours objecting to this wedding.
CROWD (Translation): Let us through.
POLICE (Translation): We don’t want to touch you.
Inside the reception centre, friends and family celebrated the wedding. Outside, there was mourning.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): God is weeping in heaven, over you, Morel.
Their prayers were confronting and personal. They called on Morel to leave her husband.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): We are calling you! Return home!
Masterminding the protests was Bentzi Gopstein. He's the leader of Lehava, a far right group opposed to Jewish assimilation that tries to prevent intermarriage, especially with Palestinians.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): We came here to establish a Jewish state and if they do something that isn’t right we have every right to stand and rail against it.
REPORTER: Can you see how some people - how the couple - might have found that upsetting or offensive, even?
BENTZI GOPSTEIN: Of course. But this is my work.
WOMAN: Two people who fall in love - they have every right to choose whether they like to be together or not.
There was also a counter-demonstration at the wedding.
WOMAN: We believe in free love and we believe in the choice they have to be together, especially against the Lehava people who stands over there.
Orthodox Jews believe that marriage to anyone who isn't Jewish is forbidden by scripture. But there's an obvious and ugly racial dimension here.
CROWD (Translation): Mohammed is dead. Mohammed is dead... Mohammed is dead... Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game. Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game. No coexistence with Arabs! May your village be burnt down. May your village be burnt down.
ZAMIRA RON DAVID (Translation): These haters...“The people of hate” as I call them in my study, they don’t contemplate the possibility that these are human encounters. There is no such thing as “human”, it doesn’t exist.
Zamira Ron David is researching mixed marriages for a PhD at Ben-Gurion University.
ZAMIRA RON DAVID (Translation): The choice of sharing one’s life comes down to the question “Can I share my life in such a hostile place with someone who is supposedly regarded as my enemy?”
Mahmoud and Morel live in Yaffo, next to Tel Aviv - famous for its mix of Jews and Palestinians. They told the media the wedding was a chance to share their love story with friends and family. It was not to make a political statement.
MOREL MALKA (Translation): We’ve been together for five years. I love him as he is. For me he’s just a human being. Love has no religion or nationality. We are happy and are enjoying it.
Before the wedding, Mahmoud went to court to try to have the protest banned. He got an injunction preventing Lehava from coming within 200m of the reception hall.
MAHMOUD MANSOUR (Translation): Hundreds of people demonstrated outside. It wasn’t fun, we were in the middle of the wedding and people wanted to ruin it.
Mahmoud and Morel still can't work out why their wedding caused so much commotion. After all, mixed marriages might be rare, but they're not unique.
MAHMOUD MANSOUR (Translation): There are dozens in Yaffo and lots in the country. Jews getting married to someone from Canada, a Jew marrying a Christian, nobody makes a fuss about that.
Bentzi Gopstein says, if Arabs and Jews marry, they should do it discreetly. Not act as though it's normal.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): It’s beginning to get into the mainstream. It comes across as if it is totally legitimate. We don’t want it to be legitimate. It should be done quietly, not with big parties.
Tel Aviv is Israel's most laid-back and cosmopolitan city. Tonight, Lehava is visiting to try and change that. I'm supposed to meet Bentzi outside this nightclub. But just up the road, he's come under attack. Militant opponents of Lehava have ambushed its bus, smashing a window.
CROWD (Translation): Racists go home! Racists go home!
Now, police are struggling to separate the two sides.
CROWD (Translation): Bentzi Gopstein, the king! Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game. Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game.
Most of the Lehava activists are young men from Jerusalem or Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. They worship Bentzi and his macho brand of Judaism.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): Friends, friends, good on you. I hope some of you managed to land some of them. We’re not Christians, we don’t turn the other cheek.
The police have escorted the Lehava bus to the port area in Tel Aviv, where they can spread their message without creating a riot.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): Good night, all the Jews of Tel Aviv. The daughter of a king only goes out with the son of a king.
Bentzi accuses Arab men of seeking out Jewish women for political, as well as romantic, reasons.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): The problem is that Arabs also treat it as a war. A part of their struggle, pardon the expression, is to fuck Jewish girls, to fuck the Jews, to humiliate us.
Although this is Lehava's first visit to Tel Aviv, it hits the streets most weeks in Jerusalem to preach segregation and to hunt down mixed couples, as seen in this news report.
NEWSREADER (Translation): This is how it looked last Thursday when they learned that two Jewish girls were out with Arabs.
CROWD (Translation): They don’t really love you. They’ll murder you. They don’t really want you, just your body.
Lehava goes out of its way to provoke. It's easy to see how this could lead to violence.
CROWD (Translation): Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game. Arabs beware! My sister is not fair game.
Here, they're handing out stickers warning Arab men to stay away from Jewish women at an Arabic restaurant. Tel Aviv might be famously tolerant, but it seems that Lehava is not without its supporters here.
GIRL (Translation): Not here, here... Go ahead, touch. He touched my tits...
GIRL: Listen to me. I can speak. We can't marry with Arabs, 'cause it's not OK. We don't mix. We don't mix! we are not chocolate. We don't mix!
MAN (Translation): What you are doing is a sacred duty...
REPORTER: What does this sticker say?
MAN: They say, "The girls of Israel only to Israeli, not to the Arab."
REPORTER: Do you have any daughters?
MAN: Yeah.
REPORTER: How would you feel if they married an Arab?
MAN: Are you crazy? Bye!
Some Lehava activists clearly believe you're never too young to receive their message. In June, they targeted this school in the southern city of Beersheba.
WOMAN (Translation): Good morning, how are you?
Hagar Primary School is extremely unusual in Israel - it has a mix of Jewish and Arab pupils, and it teaches them about both cultures.
ORIT FRYBURG, PRINCIPAL: I just got here one morning at 7:30, and all the yard is full with stickers. They were white. It was written that Jews and Arabs should not be in any connection and that an Arab shouldn't touch a Jew. It was all over the place.
Principal Orit Fryburg was so anxious to get rid of the stickers, she kept only a few before calling the police.
REPORTER: How did you feel, seeing this?
ORIT FRYBURG: It was like someone got into my house and wrote bad things about me. It felt really, really bad.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN: I don't do it. I don't know who do it.
REPORTER: They're Lehava stickers, though.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN: Yeah. I give stickers to people - I don't know where they put them, and who put it. But I don't cry when I hear it.
REPORTER: Because you disapprove of a school like this?
BENTZI GOPSTEIN: Of course.
Local rabbi Yehuda Harel says the police suspected he was involved in vandalising the school.
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): I received phone calls, they tried to interrogate me. They were trying to find out if I did it or not. I told everyone “It’s not the way, it’s wrong. Patiently explaining is the right way. Breaking and entering other people’s property is overdoing it.”
But Rabbi Harel is a great supporter of Lehava.
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t. I have very good Arab friends. I simply... But I love those Arabs who know their place. Who know their role. Who know that Jews... are a collective body to whom they should not get close. For example, to take, touch and look at a Jewish woman is to harm that body, and if that body is harmed I would regard myself as about as extreme and right wing as they come. In that respect, I’m racist.
The rabbi has personal reasons for his strong feelings.
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): This a song about the virtues of the people of Israel.
Just a few days ago, his youngest daughter married a Jewish man.
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): When I sang this song at the wedding, it was full of meaning.
But he also has an older daughter, Chen, who lives with a Bedouin man, and they have five children together. She came to her sister's wedding.
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): Here she is now. What a princess! With God’s help she’ll also experience a Jewish wedding like this with a Jewish groom.
REPORTER: Bentzi believes that most marriages to Arabs end in tragedy, that they treat their wives badly. Is this something that your daughter has experienced?
RABBI YEHUDA HAREL (Translation): Regrettably, it’s not the case with her. My daughter is treated well. He does not hit her he doesn’t even raise his voice. It is a pity, otherwise she’d have returned home. She’d have returned very quickly..
Today, pupils from the Hagar School have been taken to a nature reserve to learn about the Jewish New Year. Next week, the school will teach them about the Islamic holiday of Eid-ul-Adha. It's all too rare in Israel for Jewish and Arab children to study each other's cultures.
JEWISH GIRL (Translation): We met in Year One. I was there from kindergarten already and suddenly the bond became stronger and stronger and now we are very good friends.
WOMAN (Translation): Was she your first friend?
ARAB GIRL (Translation): Yes. She was the most lovely friend I had and I met her and we played together. When she needed help I helped her and when I needed help she also helped me.
REPORTER: How would you feel if they decided to marry? If your Jewish children decided to marry an Arab?
WOMAN: I don't have any problem. For me, no.
REPORTER: No problem? And for you?
WOMAN 2:We'll see it. They are in love. They could fight for it!
Bentzi Gopstein from Lehava is horrified by the prospect of Jewish and Arab school friends falling in love. He remembers what Morel's husband, Mahmoud, told an Israeli newspaper before their wedding.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN (Translation): I went to school with Jewish girls, and you can’t tell me that I can play with them in class, that I can learn alongside them in class and we can do everything together, but the minute I fall in love you tell me to stop.
REPORTER: About 20% of Israel's population is Arab. It sounds as though your vision of Israel is that this 20% should be sealed off from the other 80%.
BENTZI GOPSTEIN: Maybe they need to go to Australia. We want here just people who think this is a Jewish state. If someone's saying this is not a Jewish state, maybe you can take them to Australia or United States. I don't care.
Morel and Mahmoud don't want to speak to the media anymore. They'd like to put their unfortunate encounter with Lehava behind them.
MAHMOUD MANSOUR (Translation): They are racist people, they have no place in this country. They are dangerous. They don’t like Arabs or secular Jews. They only like themselves. We got the wedding we never dreamed of.
Reporter/Camera
AMOS ROBERTS
Additional Camera
YONATHAN WEITZMAN
Producer
ALLAN HOGAN
Fixer
EVA LALOUM
Editors
DAVID POTTS
MICAH MCGOWN
Translations/Subtitling
SOL SALBE
DINA SMITH
21st October 2014