Nixing mixing

In my 85 years of living, I have seen all too often that when couples of different customs and religion marry, or even enter a relationship, it usually does not work out.

Rachel Hartman (“I’m engaged to a gentile, my sister fights intermarriage, but we’re still family,” October 3), takes the side of intermarriage because she has formed a relationship with a “non-Jew.” She is careful not to mention his background, which raises the suspicion that he is a Muslim Arab, perhaps a “Palestinian.” I wonder if she knows that Arab “Palestinians” did not exist before

the mid-1960s and that, in fact, before Israel came into

being, the Jews living here were the Palestinians. The Arabs shunned the name. They took it up, by their own admission, as a political tool to rid the land of the Jews.

If indeed, her relationship is with a Muslim Arab, I urge her to proceed with extreme caution. Women have very limited rights in their society. While a few “Palestinians” would be willing to live alongside Jews, most have been brainwashed in their homes and in their schools to hate Jews and to want them removed from Middle Eastern soil. Even those who are apparently Westernized conform to the mores they live under when they re-enter their own society.

I would recommend that Hartman view the film Not Without My Daughter. It is fact-based and is what happens all too often.

I am not a racist; just a realist. I am not against marriage to black, green, yellow, red, brown, beige or white Jews. I said the same to my children and now say it to my grandchildren, whether their attention may focus on

Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Bahai. Stick within

your own comfort zone, stay with your own people with whom you have a common understanding.

EDMUND JONAH

Rishon Lezion