Revealing the new Arab Israeli woman

October 11, 2011 - 9:36 AM by David

Huda Naccache during her photo shoot for Lilac (AFP)

Seeing Israeli models in skimpy bikinis on the covers of magazines around the world is as old hat as… Bar Rephaeli. But there’s still a buzz that’s created when the magazine cover is in Israel and the model is an Israeli Arab.

22-year-old Christian Arab Haifa resident Huda Naccache made history recently when the Nazareth-based women’s magazine Lilac features her on the cover and inside dressed in a bikini.

According to the media reports that followed – in newspapers and on the nightly Channel 10 news – it was the first time an Arabic magazine here has put a model in a bikini on its cover, as well as the first time an Arab-Israeli model has been featured, um, so amply, on a cover.

Naccache, a geography and archaeology student who’s representing Israel in the Miss Earth competition in Thailand in December, told AFP that she was proud of her accomplishment and saw nothing wrong with it.

“I have a family that supports me very much and had no objections whatsoever to me appearing on the cover in a bikini,” she said. “My father was very pleased when he saw it for the first time. He said it was very beautiful and wished me good luck.”

Much of Israel’s Arab minority still holds deeply-traditional values, and some Israeli media suggested that Naccache’s photo shoot was aimed as a challenge to those conservative norms, even dubbing the cover the “Arab bikini revolution.”

Naccache dismissed the hoopla surrounding the cover and the claims that only because she’s a Christian Arab, and not a Muslim, were her photos allowed to be run without incident.

“I am the first Christian to wear a bikini on the front page, but there were two Muslim models who did it,” she said.

Yara Mashour, the editor of Lilac, which was founded in 2000, agreed that it’s a new, more open world for Arab women in Israel, regardless of their religion.

“It had nothing do with religion at all,” she told AFP. “And since her cover, Arab girls from all sorts of different backgrounds have been coming to me and offering to do something similar. The Arab community accepted it in a democratic fashion. I know there were debates about her appearing as she did, but it happened in a modern way: some were in favor and some were against, but there were no problems.”

For Naccache, can a visit to the pages of Sports Illustrated be far behind?

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