* I was at my Jewish grandfather’s house tonight for “shabbat”. My twin sister, who is a millennial, was delighted by the Israeli serviettes on the dinner table. I realised then that for her and others like her, Zionism is a respectable and high-brow form of nationalism. She would scoff at a similar display of Australian nationalism. Indeed, she did exactly that when my Grandfather protested about my brother’s t-shirt, which bore an Austrian crest on it. ‘How dare you wear a t-shirt bearing a crest of the country which murdered my parents in the holocaust!’, he said. I was rolling my eyes as he was saying this. My sister then brought up how white people ‘genocided’ Australian aborigines in Tasmania. My grandfather nodded approvingly as she was went through the list of all the bad things white Australians did. “Did you know that black people couldn’t marry white people 40 years ago!”, she said. I muttered that non-jews still can’t marry jews in Israel today.
* There is no civil marriage in Israel, so Muslim, Christian, and Druze clergy control religious marriages and don’t allow intermarriage (or gay marriage, etc). This is not only a Jewish thing – it applies to these other sectors as well. It is only accurate to say that “People of one religion cannot obtain a religious marriage to people of another religion in Israel.” But of course we need to seize at every thread to say something unflattering about Jews, right?
Israel recognizes any marriages performed abroad, and Israelis routinely go to Cyprus to marry any person they want, including Jews marrying non-Jews, which is then perfectly legally recognized in Israel.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu’s son will probably soon marry his non-Jewish Norwegian girlfriend and the marriage will be valid in Israel.
People who are anti-Israel are so misinformed it is embarrassing. There is plenty to criticize there yet they never seem to get it right.
