J/P-Dating in the Holy Land

Written by Ilana Sichel

Jews in the News
The last thing most Jewish women expect when they set up a JDate profile is to meet Palestinians. Lucia Pizarro is not most Jewish women.

Pizarro, an Israeli citizen and the International Coordinator of Jerusalem’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, has met three Palestinian men in as many years, through the Jewish matchmaking web site and its predecessor, JCupid.com.

One night back in 2002, Pizarro stumbled across a “really really sweet guy” in a chat room. Upon hitting it off in a private chat window and seeing that, unlike everyone else she’d been meeting, he was very supportive of her anti-occupation work, she asked him for his digits.

“I don’t know if you’ll still want to talk to me when you find out what I am,” she recalls him saying.

“I thought maybe he might be transgender. I begged him, ‘Just tell me, I’m open-minded. I don’t care.’”

“I’m Muslim,” he said.

“Now you really have to call me,” Lucia replied.

No romantic sparks flew in person, but the two became fast friends, and Lucia takes credit for politicizing the man from Taybeh, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank, on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Before meeting, she said, he was less concerned with the Occupation than he was with his own career.

Since embarking on her virtual dating adventure, Pizarro has yet to meet a Jewish man through JDate who has been truly supportive of her political work. As her new friend convinced her, in the absence of PDate, JDate was really the only way to meet women in his own country: Israel. “And that’s just fine with me,” Pizarro added.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.