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Israel/ Palestine

Israeli Court Punishes Palestinian-Israeli for Passing

Juan Cole 07/22/2010

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The conviction in Israel of a Palestinian-Israeli man on rape charges because he had consensual sex with an Israeli woman who thought he was Jewish is completely recognizable to anyone who knows the history of race relations in the United States as a punishment for passing.

(pdf): Passing was the practice of light-skinned persons with at least some African-American heritage moving in white society and concealing their African lineage. The peculiar American racial definition made persons African-American if they had virtually any African ancestry at all (the one drop rule). In contrast, no one in Arab societies cares if someone´s mother or grandmother was from the Sudan, and Brazilians conceive of race as on a spectrum (not that there is no racism there but it is not the old US black-white absolute).

It was to forestall and punish passing, which of course led to intimate relations between what US society defined as Blacks and Whites, that miscegenation laws were passed.

For the history of miscegenation see this site.

There were many miscegenation cases similar to that of “Dudu” in Jim Crow legal history.

Filed Under: Israel/ Palestine

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



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The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


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