Israeli police on Sunday blocked more than 200 far-right Israeli protesters from rushing guests at a wedding of a Jewish woman and Muslim man as they shouted "death to the Arabs" in a sign of tensions stoked by the Gaza war, according to Reuters.
A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest, Reuters reported. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 218 yards from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel in the past two months amid a monthlong Gaza war, the kidnap and slaying of three Israeli teens in June followed by a revenge choking and torching to death of a Palestinian teen in the Jerusalem area, according to Reuters.
Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a "traitor against the Jewish state," and shouted epithets of hatred toward Arabs including "death to the Arabs," Reuters reported.
They sang a song that urges, "May your village burn down," and a few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: "Love conquers all," according to Reuters.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, sworn in last month to succeed Shimon Peres, criticized the protest as a "cause for outrage and concern" in a message on his Facebook page, Reuters reported.
"Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here, in Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic," Rivlin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud bloc, said, according to Reuters.
Lehava spokesman and former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari denounced Jews intermarrying with non-Jews of any denomination as "worse than what Hitler did," alluding to the murder of 6 million Jews across Europe in World War Two, Reuters.
