Going down the road

Have you ever had the experience of reading about one specific topic only to inadvertently discover the answer to an entirely different question? I was reading this Ynet News opinion piece concerning Jimmy Carter’s latest book today and discovered a fact about West Bank access roads which had previously escaped me.

For at least the last twenty years, I have been hearing about access roads in Judea & Samaria in which only “settlers” (code word for Jews) were allowed to use. I even seem to recall a 60 Minutes episode (from the outer edges of my memory) which utilized the “settler only roads” to highlight the plight of the Palestinian Arabs under the “occupation”.

I admit I was never overtly disturbed by the idea of “settler only roads’ in light of the horrific history of sniper attacks and random acts of violence in the region by Palestinian terrorists. Quite frankly, it seemed like quite a prudent response given the circumstances.

I admit I was somewhat taken back when I read this Treppenwitz post on access roads given the charges of road apartheid, which have been bandied about liberally for years - nor was the irony lost on me.

But it was this opinion piece by Tamar Sternthal carried in Ynet News that brought the issue into direct focus for me.:

Shulamit Aloni's Dec. 31, 2006 Op-Ed in the Hebrew edition of Ynet, in which she alleged that the "American Jewish establishment's onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth (that) Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies," is no exception.

To make her case, Aloni makes two egregiously false assertions. First, she repeatedly states that there are "Jewish only" roads in the West Bank. While there are West Bank roads prohibited to Palestinians, there are no "Jewish only" roads. Israel's Arab citizens and Israeli citizens of any religion or ethnicity have just as much right to travel on those restricted roads as do Israeli Jews. Israeli Arabs frequently use the bypass roads for business and to visit relatives.

Moreover, at least one Israeli Arab, Wael Ghanem, was fatally shot by Palestinian terrorists on one of these roads. Also, Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a Greek Orthodox monk, was shot to death by Palestinian terrorists, while traveling on a supposedly "Jewish only" road. More recently, on June 11, 2006, east Jerusalem Arab Marwan Abed Shweika was killed in a shooting attack on highway 443, which is largely off-limits to Palestinians but open to Israeli Arabs and other non-Jews. (Incidentally, the Dor gas station on highway 443, close to the Palestinian village of Kharbata, is owned and operated by the Hawaja family, Israeli Arabs. Its signs are in Arabic and Hebrew.)

The "Jewish only" roads falsehood is the basis for Aloni's false, defamatory charge that Israel is guilty of South Africa-like Apartheid "racial separation." The real racism, though, is on the part of Aloni, who completely ignores Israel's 20 percent non-Jewish minority which regularly uses those roads.

All of which goes to show that rarely is anything as it seems on surface and never let those with an axe to grind frame the debate. Oh, and the Israelis really do have the worse PR people in the history of the human race.