Isreal is sending the wrong Signal: Love life of Israeli PM’s Son sparks uproar

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JERUSALEM (AP) — The love life of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son is setting off sparks — in Israeli politics.
News that 23-year-old Yair Netanyahu is dating a statuesque non-Jewish Norwegian university student was not only a juicy item for the gossip pages. It also unleashed an uproar from religious lawmakers opposed to intermarriage, and prompted debate over the Jewish state’s relationship with the outside world.
According to reports in Norwegian media, the Israeli prime minister boasted to his Norwegian counterpart, Erna Solberg, about the relationship during a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week and informed her that his son recently visited Norway with his girlfriend, Sandra Leikanger. A photo of the smiling young couple appeared in both Israeli and Norwegian newspapers.
On Monday, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said he believed the relationship actually caused Netanyahu and his wife great “heartache.” Arieh Deri told a local radio station the relationship was no mere personal matter because Netanyahu is a “symbol of the Jewish people.”

“I know friends of mine who invest tens of millions and more, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation in the world,” Deri told the Kol Barama station. “If God forbid it’s true, woe to us.”
Other groups called on Netanyahu to put a stop to the relationship. Even the prime minister’s brother in law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, took to the airwaves to speak out against it.

“Yair should know that if he does such a thing, if he doesn’t break off the relationship, then … he is spitting on the graves of his grandmother and grandfather who loved him so much and raised him,” Ben-Artzi told Kikar Shabbat, an ultra-Orthodox news site.

Ben-Artzi, an outspoken Jewish nationalist who is often critical of the prime minister, said he had not spoken to the family in months. “Maybe they weren’t in touch because they were afraid to tell me,” he said.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment, as did Leikanger.

Israel always had an ultra-Orthodox minority of devout and conservative Jews, who currently account for just under a tenth of the population. Thanks to their political clout, the ultra-Orthodox oversee weddings, divorces and burials — meaning that the younger Netanyahu would not be permitted to marry his girlfriend here — if they one day get serious — unless she converts. Orthodox Jewish Law prohibits intermarriage.

In recent years Israel’s internal rupture has become even more complex, with religious Jews of various shades, and ultranationalists, increasingly pitted against a secular population that can be extraordinarily progressive on issues like gay rights. The cultural clash has become so extreme — over issues like the religious desire to segregate the sexes on some bus lines or the refusal by the religious to performing compulsory military service — that many Jews joke the internal divisions are more intractable than the troubles with the Palestinians.
Yossi Sarid, a former Israeli education minister and onetime leader of the secular-rights party Meretz, called the younger Netanyahu’s love life a “private matter.” But he said the uproar among the religious was “nonsense.”

“It’s not fair. You can’t expect fairness from those people,” Sarid said. “They don’t like non-Jews. They don’t like non-Orthodox Jews. They are behaving as fanatics everywhere behave.”

Anthony-Claret Ifeanyi Onwutalobi

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Anthony-Claret Ifeanyi Onwutalobi

Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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