Officials ban book depicting love story between Israeli and Palestinian from Israeli classrooms

Israel’s education ministry has disqualified an acclaimed book depicting a love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian from being taught in schools because of perceptions that mixed relationships are a “threat to a separate identity”.

Borderlife, a book by Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli author with Persian roots, tells the story of Liat, a translator from Tel Aviv and Hilmi, a Palestinian artist from the West Bank who meet in New York City and fall in love.

The book charts their relationship, and its repercussion once both Liat and Hilmi return home to Israel and the West Bank respectively. The book was highly acclaimed in Israel and in 2015 won the Bernstein Prize, a literary award given to Israeli writers under the age of 50.

The book, which won Israel's prestigious Bernstein Prize in 2015, was initially recommended to be added to the school curriculum by a committee of academics, following the request of a number of teachers, Israel daily newspaper Haaretz reported.

Senior education ministry officials disqualified the book, saying that “intimate relations between Jews and non Jews, and certainly the option of formalising them through marriage and having a family – even if it doesn’t come to fruition in the story – is perceived by large segments of society as a threat to a separate identity,” Haaretz reported.

Another reason cited for the ban was that today's adolescents were not sufficiently concerned with "considerations involving maintaining the identity of people and the significance of assimilation”.

The office of Naftali Bennett, education minister from the Right-wing pro-settlements Jewish Home party, said that he backed the decision, which has drawn an outcry from the country's literary establishment.

Earlier this year, upon taking up the post of education minister, Mr Bennett pledged to “incorporate a comprehensive programme for instilling values into the curriculum”.

Responding to the decision, the author said the action only highlighted the fear of ‘the other’ amongst Israel’s political establishment.

“It’s as if they think that if you prevent them from reading a book that deals with this question, then you make the problem go away. I see the politicians’ fear. The prime minister’s decade in power was purchased with this fear,” Ms Rabinyan said in an interview with Israeli army radio on Thursday morning.

Sami Michael, an acclaimed Israeli author of A Trumpet in the Wadi, which centres around a relationship between a Russian-Israeli man and a Christian Arab-Israeli woman, described the decision as "a dark day for Hebrew literature”.

Some Israeli politicians, mainly from the Left, also condemned the move.

“Today the education minister bans Dorit Rabinyan’s book because it has a love story between a Jewish woman and an Arab man. Tomorrow he’ll ban the Bible because it has a love story between a Moabite woman and a Jewish man? And they call themselves ‘Jewish Home’?”, said Dov Hanin, an MP from the Joint Arab List party.

Merav Michaeli, an MP from the Labour party, linked the banning of the book to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s provocative statement on election day in March 2015, warning of “hordes of Arabs on their way to the polling stations”, and to the policies of the Lehava extremist group which seeks to prevent relationships between Jews and Arabs.

“These are two sides of the same coin,” Ms Michaeli wrote.

“In a place where people are disqualified, it's clear that books that represent them as humans are also disqualified.

"In a place where people with views that are unacceptable to the government are marked, it's clear that works of literature and art are also censored. The thought police is already here.”

The issue of inter-religious relationships in Israel is a thorny one. According to the law, couples can get married only in religious courts and only to partners of the same faith, which is why most mixed-religion couples get married abroad, usually in Cyprus. Israel, however, recognises civil marriages -even between couples of different faiths - that have been performed elsewhere.

Mr Netanyahu’s second wife was non-Jewish, before she converted. Last year, the revelation that the prime minister's son was in a relationship with a non-Jewish Norwegian woman prompted outrage among hardliners.