X-Rated Mossad Agents Lure Arab Eyes

As we drove through Gaza, my translator, a guy in his early twenties, pointed out three lovely Palestinian women, all wearing stylish headscarves and tight jeans. As they strolled out the university gates, they were laughing shyly, intimately. It was clear that my translator wanted my opinion.

“They’re beautiful,” I reply. And indeed they were.

But his response floored me.

“Beautiful, yes. But not as beautiful as Israeli girls,” my Palestinian translator says ruefully.

And where had my Gaza translator seen Israeli girls? He’d spotted them from afar, at a checkpoint --slouching, teenaged Israeli soldier girls in olive-drab uniforms and knock-off Chanel shades.

I guess that’s the ultimate taboo around the Middle East: fantasizing about Israeli girls, the sexual power of the enemy.

There’s proof of this on the internet: A fellow blogger, Israelity Bites, picked up an interview that Variety.com did with Nir Shahar, who runs an Israeli porn site. Shahar claims he’s had over 100,000 hits from eager porn perusers in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

His website, Ratuv, which means ‘wet’ in Hebrew (nothing left to the imagination there!), adds piquancy to the standard bump and grind by dressing up his porn starlets as Mossad agents, soldiers or women cops. It’s so popular that Shahar is launching an Arabic version. “We received many ‘thank you’ messages from Arab surfers. Many asked if the female soldiers really serve in the IDF,” he says. Any doubts and they could also check out the men’s mag, Maxim, which recently ran a spread on Israeli army beauties sans their olive-drabs, though I imagine that Saudi censors would be scratching furiously with their black felt pens on copies of that issue.

Shahar says his most popular porn feature is :Code Name: Deep Investigation”, described as “an X-rated parody of the arrest of Mordechai Vanunu, who spilled the beans on Israel’s nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. He was eventually caught by Mossad, who sent a beautiful female agent to trap him.”

It is strange to me that in a region not known for women’s rights, the kind of porn that sells best is of women as Oppressor or Cruel Betrayer… Any thoughts, readers?

---by Tim McGirk