The international women’s human rights organization MADRE has condemned an Israeli court for sentencing a Palestinian man to eighteen months in prison for having consensual sex with an Israeli woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew. The court ruled the Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, had committed rape by deception because he posed as a Jewish bachelor. MADRE compared the ruling to now-defunct US laws against “race mixing” that were once used to uphold white supremacy. Meanwhile, a prominent Israeli rape crisis center has publicly supported the court’s ruling. Merav Mor, the director of resource development at the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, appeared on Al Jazeera on Wednesday.

Merav Mor: “I really, really don’t think there was any discrimination on any racial ground. I think this is purely a case of a man giving false information in order to fraudulently coerce a women into a sexual relationship. It’s, again, wrong to say this was consensual. If a woman or a man feels that they were given wrong information, they were raped, and this has absolutely nothing to do with the Arab situation in Israel, the conflict. The rape crisis centers see this as a criminal case of rape, and that’s what the courts decided.”