Mixed marriage brings out protesters

Israeli police blocked more than 200 far-Right Israeli protesters from rushing guests at a wedding of a Jewish woman and Muslim man yesterday as they shouted ‘‘death to the Arabs’’ in a sign of tensions stoked by the Gaza war.

Dozens of police, including members of elite units, formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall’s gates and chased after many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested. There were no injuries.

A lawyer for 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. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 metres from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.

The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jews and Arab citizens in Israel in the past two months amid a month-long 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.

A group called Lehava, which organised the wedding protest, has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage. But they have rarely protested at the site of a wedding.

The groom told Israel’s television Channel 2 the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit.

‘‘We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favour co-existence,’’ he said.

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 towards Arabs, including ‘‘death to the Arabs’’. They sang a song that urges: ‘‘May your village burn down.’’

A few dozen Left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: ‘‘Love conquers all.’’

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin criticised the protest as a ‘‘cause for outrage and concern’’.

‘‘Such expressions undermine the basis of our co-existence here, in Israel . . .’’

Photo: REUTERS The happy couple: The groom, Mahmoud Mansour, 26, and his bride Maral Malka, 23, celebrate in his home with friends and family before their wedding in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv. Israeli police formed a human chain to keep Jewish protesters away.