By Elizabeth Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East

JERUSALEM, Israel – An Arab man has been sentenced to jail time by a Jerusalem District Court for holding himself out to be a single Jewish bachelor to a Jewish woman he had consensual sex with.

According to the woman, thirty-year-old Sabbar Kashur introduced himself as a single Jew looking for a serious relationship. The two then had sex in a nearby building.  When the woman later discovered that Kashur was not Jewish, she filed a police complaint which ultimately let to charges of rape and indecent assault.

Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused Kashur of ‘rape by deceit.’

Judge Zvi Segal said, in the verdict, that the court had the duty to protect the public from sophisticated criminals who could deceive innocent victims. “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated.”

The standard for ‘rape by deception,’ according to High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, is whether an ordinary person would expect such a woman to have sex with a man without the false identity he created. Rubinstein stated that a conviction of rape should be imposed whenever a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”

Abeer Baker, an attorney with Adalah, an organization that advocates for Arab rights in Israel, said of the legal standard: “In this case, the ruling seems to say that if a ‘reasonable’ Jewish woman knew a man was an Arab, then she would not make love to him.”

Baker called this a “dangerous precedent,” and said it opened the door to allowing the Israeli government to interfere in the private lives of citizens.

Kashur has been under house arrest for nearly two years since the incident occurred.  He said that he first met the woman, who was in her late twenties, when he was leaving a grocery store in downtown Jerusalem and she asked him about his motorcycle. He told the woman his nickname, which was ‘Dudu,’ a common Jewish nickname for Daniel. He said:

“I said my name is Dudu because that’s how everybody knows me. My wife even calls me that.”

Kashur asserts that the verdict is racist, and his lawyers are contemplating an appeal of his sentence.  He said:

“For two years I’ve been under house arrest for nothing . . . If I were Jewish they wouldn’t even have questioned me. That’s not called rape. I didn’t rape her in the forest and throw her away naked. She agreed to everything that happened.”

The High Court of Justice set a precedent for rape by deception in 2008 when they convicted Zvi Sleiman, a Jewish man who impersonated a senior official in the Housing Ministry whose wife worked in the National Insurance Institute.  He told the women he deceived that he could get them a better apartment and higher insurance payments if they slept with him.

The High Court also convicted a man on three counts of fraud for telling a woman he was a neurosurgeon in order to persuade her to have sex with him.

Elkana Laist of the Public Defender’s Office said that the Jerusalem District Court’s conviction had gone too far, “opening the door to a rape conviction every time a person lies regarding the details of his identity.” She added: “Every time the court thinks a reasonable woman would not have had sex with a man based on that representation, the man will be charged with rape. That approach is not accepted around the world either.”

Laist also said that the decision is paternalistic to women and problematic in application.  “It means that every time a man tells a woman he loves her, based on which she sleeps with him, he could be convicted of rape.”

Dana Pugach, head of the Noga Center for Victims of Crime, said, however, that she had no problem with the verdict. 

“We all have different characteristics, and it is a person’s right to have sexual relations with a person knowing the facts about those characteristics. I see no difference between impersonating a Jew if you are an Arab and a wealthy pilot when you are penniless, if those are relevant characteristics to the decision to have sex.”

A 2007 poll conducted by Israel’s Geocartography Institute found that more than fifty percent of Israeli Jews thought marrying an Arab was “equal to national treason.” 

Intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is actually forbidden in Israel, and, in the settlement of Pisgat Zeev, a vigilante group patrolled the streets for more than a decade looking for mixed couples. Another settlement, Petah Tikva, has established a team of pyschologists and counsellors to “rescue” Jewish women from relationships with Arab men.

Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, asked whether the “rape by deception” law would have been applied differently in the case of an Arab woman deceived into having sex with a Jewish man. 

“Would he have been convicted of rape?” Levy asked. “The answer is: of course not.”

For more information, please see:

Al Jazeera – Israel jails Arab for ‘deceit rape’ – 21 July 2010

Haarezt.com – Jurists say Arab’s rape conviction sets dangerous precedent – 21 July 2010

Reuters – Israel jails Arab in “sex through fraud” case  – 21 July 2010

The Atlantic Wire – Israel Jails Arab for Bedding Jew Under False Pretenses – 21 July 2010

Haaretz.com – Arab man who posed as Jew to seduce woman convicted of rape – 20 July 2010