The wedding of Israeli couple Mahmoud Mansour and Morel Malka should have been the happiest day of their lives.
But outside, an angry crowd was calling on the Jewish bride to leave her Palestinian groom.
“God is weeping in heaven over you Morel,” protester Bentzi Gopstein shouted to the crowd. “We are calling you. Return home.”
Gopstein is the leader of far-right group Lehava that wants to end intermarriage and enforce strict separation of Jews and Arabs, especially those who are Palestinian.
"We came here to establish a Jewish state and if they do something that isn’t right, we have every right to stand and rail against it,” he told Dateline reporter Amos Roberts.
“I love him as he is, for me he’s just a human being."
Orthodox Jews believe that marriage to anyone who isn’t Jewish is forbidden by scripture, but it’s Arabs that have become the focus of Lehava’s campaign.
“A Jew marrying a Christian, nobody makes a fuss about that,” the Arab groom at the centre of the protest, Mahmoud, says. “They are racist people, they have no place in this country. They are dangerous.”
“I love him as he is, for me he’s just a human being,” his Jewish wife, Morel, tells Amos. “Love has no religion or nationality. We are happy and enjoying it.”
During regular night patrols in Jerusalem, Lehava activists warn Palestinian men to stay away from 'their' women. They even hunt down mixed couples.
“They don’t really love you, they’ll murder you,” two Jewish girls are told after Lehava activists find them socialising with Arab men. “They don’t really want you, just your body.”
Most of the activists are young men from Jerusalem or Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.
It’s not just adults who are the target of their campaign. Earlier this year, a bilingual school in the southern city of Beersheba was plastered with Lehava stickers.
“These haters… they don’t contemplate the possibility that these are human encounters,” Zamira Ron David tells Amos. She’s researching mixed marriages at Ben Gurion University.
“The choice of sharing one’s life comes down to the question, can I share my life in such a hostile place with someone who is supposedly regarded as my enemy?” she says.
But Lehava’s response to criticism is blunt.
“Maybe they need to go to Australia,” Gopstein says of the Arabs that make up 20% of Israel’s population. “We want here just people who think this is a Jewish state.”
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