Tel-Chai Nation

According to a long report in the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli police have managed to curb honor murders for the first time in a decade:

Samah Salaime Egbariya sits in her small storefront office in the Israeli-Arab town of Lod and describes some of the murders in Lod and Ramle in recent years, rattling off the names of the women gunned down and stabbed to death by male relatives in what are commonly called “honor killings.”

She mentions the case of Yasmine Abu Tzaluk of Lod, who was shot 14 times – including seven times in the head – by her husband, Khaled, in April 2011, after a long dispute over his decision to take a second wife, and of a beautiful teenage girl killed after refusing her brother’s demand that she marry his business associate, a drug dealer from Jaffa.

Inside the office of the organization she runs – Na’am – Arab Women in the Center – Egbariya is collecting chairs and tables for a lecture and puppet show about sexual abuse that her organization is performing for young Arab women at a community center across the street, an event she says would have been unthinkable a few years back.

According to Egbariya, such community outreach by her organization and others has helped foster a greater awareness among local Arab women about what is permissible in relationships, and how to exert their own rights at home, an awareness that she says is partly responsible for the fact that in 2012, for the first time in a decade, not a single Israeli-Arab woman was murdered in a so-called honor killing in the police’s Central District.

While this article is interesting, one of the interviewees unfortunately downplays one of the more serious matters in the case:

[Yigal] EZRA ARGUES that Israelis have erred in viewing these murders as part of Islamic tradition, saying they’re in fact part of a pre-Islamic Beduin tradition that has spread into the wider Arab culture.

It is, he says “a clash between tradition and modernity and the criminality of people involved.

“What you have are criminal gangs that have taken over the culture of their families with their culture of machismo and criminality,” he says.

Has this man actually read the contents of the Koran? While I'm sure the concept could have existed long before Islam, it still ended up becoming part of a whole demonic belief system, and if we ignore that, we won't solve the problems completely.

The Israeli police should be congratulated for a job well done. But downplaying the beliefs expressed in the Koran is ill-advised, and if we don't scrutinize it, we won't solve the problems altogether.

Labels: islam, Israel, Israeli Arabs, misogyny