Monday, February 19, 2007

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.

2 comments:

JoeSettler said...

I posted this on Treppenwitz's site at the time:


Actually, you fell into a common trap with the wording in your article.

The bypass roads are/were not "Jewish-only" - they are "Israeli-only" which includes Israeli Arabs, but excludes "Palestinian" Arabs.

The same goes for highway 443 that runs over the green line. All Israeli citizens (such as Arabs) may use it, Palestinian citizens may not.

The "Arab only" roads on the other hand are aptly named, as "Palestinian" Arabs and Israeli Arabs are allowed on them, just not Jews.

So it really begs the question, "Are 'Palestinian' Arabs a different race or just citizens of a different State/entity from Israeli Arabs?", because those that choose to abuse the word apartheid seem to imply they are a different race from their fellow Arabs as opposed to citizens of an enemy state/entity.

K. Shoshana said...

I think most of us in North America have fallen into that trap. Often our news media gets around this by protraying the roads as "settler access roads only" rather than coming out and saying "Israeli access roads". Settler being the code/buzz word for Jews.

It puts a different complexion on the matter when one learns the roads are only for Israeli citizens. It requires quite a leap of imagination to keep claiming the Israeli state is a quasi-apartheid state by being dodgy with its Arab citizens.

But you bring up another interesting point. If the Israeli authorities allow both Palestinian and Israeli Arabs to drive on the "Arab" access roads only, isn't the Israeli state practising a form of innate discrimination against its Jewish citizens?

If anything, it sets up a special class of citizenship with full privledges and benefits, but few responsibilies.

But I suppose I won't being seeing 60 Minutes air an investigation of the Israeli State's discriminatory practises against Jewish citizens anytime in the near future.