Lehava
Lehava (Hebrew meaning "Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land") is a Jewish organization based in Israel that strictly opposes Jewish assimilation, objecting to most personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews. It has an anti-miscegenation focus, denouncing marriages between Jews and non-Jews forbidden by Orthodox Jewish law.
Other issues include opposition to the Christian presence in Israel and LGBT pride parades.
It has over 10,000 members, with chapters in every city.
The organization has associations with Kahanism.
In 2016, Lehava's social media efforts were generating approximately 200,000 anti-Arab hate postings per year to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, about a quarter of which called for physical violence against Arabs. Despite this, Facebook deleted only seven Lehava accounts because of improper conduct. Lehava is stated to continue to generate Facebook postings via other accounts.
The pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League in 2016 stated that the leader Gopstein called Christians "bloodsucking vampires", condoned burning Christian churches, and that his Facebook page includes anti-LGBT posts, as well as ones the ADL calls "extremely abusive, racist, inflammatory, and violent". The ADL protested Israel's ongoing acceptance of Lehava's "hateful discourse" as detrimental to the country, and that it gives "a weapon [to] Israel's enemies, who use it as a basis for their rushed conclusions and generalizations about Israeli society".
Nine years after an initial complaint had been laid by a movement in Reform Judaism regarding his behavior, in 2019 Gopstein was indicted for incitement to violence, racism and support for terrorism on the basis of a series of statements he made over a five year period from 2012 to 2017, such as praising the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, defending the actions of youths involved in the Zion Square assault, calling Palestinians a cancer, and stating that there was no shortage of Arabs who deserved to be beaten up.
