According to Israeli newspaper Maariv, the Tel Aviv municipality has approved a new counseling program to ‘assist’ Jewish girls who have relationships with Arab men or boys and to prevent such relationships developing in the first place.
The programme, called “Assistance programme for immigrant girls at risk”, is jointly run by the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Israeli Ministry of [Immigrant] Absorption and the World Congress of Bukharan Jews. It has been allocated a sum of NIS 250,000 (roughly £40,000) and is designed to ‘treat’ up to 120 girls under the age of 22, mainly girls whose families immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union.
Maariv quoted a senior source in the Tel Aviv municipality as saying, “This is a war against the trend of scores of Jewish girls getting together with minority men and with migrant workers, and then getting into trouble with their families and the families of the minority men, that often ostracize them for being Jewish.”
In September last year, the neighboring town of Petach Tikva also opened a municipal unit to locate Jewish girls who date Arabs and provide them with “psychological counseling”.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has expressed shock at what it defines as a racist programme. Hagai El-Ad, ACRI’s director, said “Neither the Tel Aviv municipality nor any other official institution can be authorized to control ‘racial purity,’ and it is inconceivable that the municipality should be allowed to interfere in romantic or other personal relationships.”
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