In July, I discussed the story of an Arab man from East Jerusalem who was initially charged with the rape and indecent assault of a Jewish woman but who, in the end, was actually convicted of 'rape by deception', meaning that he had had consensual sex with the woman in question but that the consent was obtained by the Arab man falsely claiming to be Jewish. The judge in the prosecution made the racist basis of this verdict about as explicit as he lawfully could. I am now told that there has been an update to this story in "the left-wing newspaper" Ha'aretz. In fact, it is an update that, I am assured, completely changes the complexion of the whole story. I have been asked by the editor of the F-word, which also covers the new claims, to publicise this information - so I'll oblige. The story is not published in the English-language version of Ha'aretz, so we have to rely on Google Translate, or this translation which is fairly close to Google's version.

The story contains edited highlights from the 100 page declassified testimony of the woman, 'B', who alleged that she was raped by Sabbar Kashur. The testimony was apparently declassified at the request of a local Ha'aretz affiliated newspaper. This forms the bulk of the article's actual content, which details the experiences of 'B' from childhood until shortly after the alleged rape. But the 'expose', as it has been called, depends on another source - the prosecution. The defence, though depicted in a rather unsympathetic light, (sadistically tormenting a rape victim, smiling through it all), is not directly quoted once in the article. The spin on the negotiations leading to a plea bargain is exclusively supplied by the prosecution, who alleged that they opted for a plea bargain - that is, an agreement on a lesser charge of 'rape by deception' - to protect their witness from the traumatic experience of being cross-examined by the defence on her past, with specific regard to previous allegations of rape against her father, and her career in prosecution. Thus, so the article has it, the defence sought to subject a vulnerable victim of rape to an emotionally lacerating attack on her credibility as a witness. It was not out of racism, the prosecution maintains, but out of humanitarian concern for their witness that the state decided to cut a deal with Sabbar Kashur, to allow him to serve a much lesser sentence for a much lesser crime.

The article comes amid a legal process, in which Kashur's defence is appealling to the Supreme Court, to the effect that the facts agreed in the original trial ought not to be the basis of a sentence. They say that his behaviour was at most 'immoral' in the sense that, per the court's verdict, he had sex with a woman while he himself was married with children, and allowed her to believe that he was a single Jewish man. The Prosecutor's Office has responded with fury to the appeal, according to the Israeli daily's account. If it is true that the criminal justice establishment is so deeply unhappy about an appeal which may further undermine their credibility and further shame them before the whole world, then this may be one reason why the court chose to release the testimony of 'B' - and, if I judge right, only that testimony. I have difficulty believing that they simply release the details of closed trials to any newspaper for the asking. I'll leave it to you to consider why Ha'aretz's local affiliate asked only for that testimony. I have also mentioned that the prosecution is quoted in the Ha'aretz article, though the defence is not. The prosecutors have good reason to cooperate with the media. Their argument is, after all, that the media's coverage of this case has been positively beneficial to the defence team. This article, which concurs with the prosecution's charge that its account of the nitty gritty of the trial was not taken seriously by the Israeli media, would therefore be a part of the prosecution's counterblast in anticipation of the Supreme Court's decision.

And this is the trouble with the over-hasty responses, such as that published on the F-Word, which treat this as a case of a victim unfairly maligned, abused in the media, which is "only too keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly ‘crying rape’". The prosecution - the Israeli state in other words - is engaged in a public relations offensive in advance of a court case, in which its single greatest asset is sympathy for a woman who, whether or not she was raped, is clearly vulnerable and in great distress. Is it not basically irresponsible to uncritically regurgitate the claims of an article that is for all intents and purposes, a puff piece for the prosecution before a major appeal? Is it not doubly irresponsible to instantaneously discount the claims of racism in this case, and trivialise the horrified responses as mere "chin scratching"? After all, it is true that the media is generally all too "keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly 'crying rape'" - but it is not true that the media is at all keen to discount stories of black or Arab men raping 'white' women. The facts of epistemic injustice, wherein someone's account is automatically devalued on account of their being black or female, do not neatly favour one interpretation or other here.

It may yet turn out that Sabbar Kashur is a rapist, though it has not been proven that he is. The Ha'aretz article, surprisingly enough for an 'expose', does not add to or subtract from the evidence one way or the other. The only evidence it deals with at all is the testimony of 'B', which might not be accurate, and which at any rate did not stand up in court. Still if it does turn out that Kashur raped 'B', then the original outrage at the state should be multiplied rather than muted, because in that case it would have taken an instance of patriarchal aggression and used it to further bolster racist patriarchy (the kind that 'protects' Jewish women from Arab men), which is unmistakeably and unavoidably what the verdict did. The interpretation of the judges ruling on the matter still says that it is a crime for an Arab man to 'pass' as a Jewish man in order to have sexual relations with a an Israeli Jewish woman, and that legal outcome is still inserted into a national context in which relations between Jews and Arabs are strictly taboo.

For these, among other reasons, I am far from convinced that the Ha'aretz article should place a whole new complexion on this story and our response to it, and am extremely dismayed by some of the incautious and uncritical responses to this story.

This is an example of racist patriarchy. A man, Sabbar Kashur, has been imprisoned for doing nothing more than having consensual sex with a woman, whose name has not been disclosed. Both parties were of age, and no one alleges that the transaction took place without consent. Initially, this was not clear, as the original complaint suggested that there had been some coercion. But as the woman's testimony in the course of the trial made clear, the only crime that Kashur, now convicted of rape, committed was to have allowed the woman to believe that he was Jewish, when in fact he was an Arab. He did not even actively perpetrate a deceit, merely chatted the woman up and didn't say "by the way, I am an Arab". And that has earned him 18 months in prison, on the basis of a plea bargain. Judge Tzvi Segal explained:

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

Are you getting it yet? Sex with an Arab constitutes a violation of the sanctity of body and soul - an "unbearable price". This is not a freakish opinion in Israeli society. For example, half of Israeli Jews believe intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is equivalent to national treason (that demographic 'timebomb', you see). Some are determined to enforce this sexual separation through violence or policy. Gangs of men in a Jerusalem neighbourhood roam around, behaving as a de facto vice and virtue squad, to 'protect' young Jewish girls from Arabs. One local authority has set up a squad of counsellors and psychiatrists to 'rescue' Jewish girls who are dating Arabs.

Hostility to inter-marriage and cross-ethnic dating pervades Zionist culture, and is reproduced at structural and institutional levels from the cradle to the grave. There has been a raft of legislative measures since 1948 that are designed to frustrate socialisation between Jews and Arabs, and the existing structures of segregation in education and housing ensure that intermarriage is already very rare. Jonathan Cook, quoting the Israeli sociologist Dr Yuval Yonay, points out that Israel's education system, designed to inculcate Zionist principles in Israeli Jews, largely succeeds in foreclosing Jewish-Arab relationships. The Israeli far right has long wished to enforce the stigma on such relationships with legislation. Meir Kahane, before he was thrown out of the Knesset in the 1980s, attempted to do just that. The current political climate in Israel, with the most racist Knesset of all time and a host of discriminatory measures in the pipeline, will tend to compound this trend.

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It's not as if it's easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It's not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown - he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial - and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up 'guilty'.

The court has therefore come down on the side of racist patriarchy, effectively joining those vice and virtue squads in 'protecting' Jewish women from any desire they may have to have sex and romance with Arab men, conserving the sanctity of the Jewish body and soul, and ensuring that the female body is strictly harnessed to the urgent task of perpetually regenerating the race. The criminal justice system itself, from the police to the prosecution and the judges, conspired to deliberately frame a consensual sex act as a violation. The fact that the verdict was secured with a plea bargain suggests that the defence also participated in this charade, intimidating and gaslighting Kashur so thoroughly that he ultimately 'confessed' to having committed a 'crime' and officially expressed a desire to be reformed. This is a calculated deterrence of inter-racial love, sex and solidarity. Perhaps it was seen as a necessary move due to the disproportionate presence of women among the Israeli peace movement, and the fear that their fraternising with the enemy is undermining militarist-nationalist morale. More likely, I think, such judgments are a logical corollary of founding a polity on the creation and maintenance of a demographically preponderant oppressor group through sheer military violence. A militarised colonial state, even one with a thin liberal democratic veneer, is necessarily a racially supremacist patriarchy, and would be so even without outlandish stunts like this conviction.