JERUSALEM: A wedding party of a Jewish woman and Muslim Palestinian was nearly stormed by 200 far-right Israeli protesters on Sunday night.
Israeli police had to form human chains to keep protesters from breaking down the wedding halls gates.
A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest.
He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 metres (yards) from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
The protest highlighted an increasing hatred for Palestinians by Israelis. A group called Lehava, which organised the wedding demonstration, has harassed Jewish-Palestinian couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage.
But they have rarely protested at the site of a wedding. The groom told Israels Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit. We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favour coexistence, he said.
Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a traitor against the Jewish state, and shouted epithets of hatred towards Palestinians including death to the Arabs.
They sang a song that urges, May your village burn down. A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: Love conquers all.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, sworn in last month to succeed Shimon Peres, criticised the protest as a cause for outrage and concern in a message on his Facebook page.
Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here, in Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic, Rivlin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus right-wing Likud bloc, said.
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