New York - A video showing Israeli Jews and Arabs kissing mysteriously disappeared from Facebook just a few hours after it was posted by TimeOut Tel Aviv on Thursday morning.
New York – A video showing Israeli Jews and Arabs kissing mysteriously disappeared from Facebook just a few hours after it was posted by TimeOut Tel Aviv on Thursday morning.
The two-minute video had garnered over 100,000 likes and been shared more than 5,500 times at the time it went off the social media platform.
Baffled by the mystery of its disappearance, its creators reportedly contacted Facebook to inquire if the video had been taken down. Yet, the video remained on YouTube and on the TimeOut website.
Facebook denied the removal of the video and the reason of its disappearance remained unclear, according to Israel’s Haaretz news.
However, as of 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, the video was reposted on TimeOut magazine’s official Facebook page, garnering over 25,000 views in less than 5 hours.
Several theories emerged after the temporary disappearance of the footage. Some believed it was removed because it allegedly violated Facebook’s community standards, promoted “sexual” behaviors between homosexualsor was taken down by hackers.
After the Israeli Ministry of Education banned from the school program a novel on the romance between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man for allegedly “threatening Jewish identity,” TimeOut Tel Aviv magazine launched a campaign against the decision.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett reportedly claimed that the book’s content was “outrageous and disturbing.”
The decision upset many Israelis and Arabs who said, “we refuse to be enemies” and denounced the ministry’s move as racist.
Following the outrage stirred by the disqualification of the book, TimeOut did the unthinkable and published a video on numerous social media platforms, in which Jews and Arabs meet and passionately kiss.
To prove that love does not differentiate between ethnicity, gender, religion or nationality, six couples of Israeli Jews and Arabs – male and female, gay and straight – agreed to pose in front of the camera and do the “forbidden deed” – express love.
According to the same source, some of them were real-life couples, some just friends, and others had never even met prior to their on-camera kiss.
When one of the participants was asked about how it felt to kiss a stranger from a different race and religion, he replied: “less strange than the [Arab-Israeli] conflict.”
