The news earlier this week that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had canceled a plan put forward by Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon to ban Palestinians from certain West Bank bus routes that serve settlements landed like a lead balloon in the international media. The scheme was never implemented but was, as Israeli President Ruben Rivlin put it, something that that has “no place being heard or said.” Indeed, even the official shelving of the idea set off a round of attacks on the Jewish state echoing the same “apartheid state” canards that the country’s representatives and friends have been working so hard to expose as lies. Yet while Israel’s supporters might well ask where Yaalon had parked his brains when treating the notion seriously, it would behoove both friends and critics to understand why such a noxious proposal would even be considered. The ever-present threat of terrorism didn’t justify or excuse anything that would essentially enshrine segregation. But it does explain how such a thing could even be discussed.
After Netanyahu nixed his dumb idea, Yaalon attempted to defend it by claiming it wasn’t technically segregation on the basis of origin. But that excuse doesn’t fly. The plan would require West Bank Palestinians with permits to work inside Israel to use a few designated checkpoints in order to board buses. That would mean they wouldn’t ride on routes that served the settlements thus ensuring that only Jews or Israeli Arabs heading to Jewish communities over the green line in the heart of the West Bank would be on those buses.
But even if it shouldn’t have gotten as close to implementation as it apparently did, the impetus for it wasn’t a function so much of prejudice as fear. The settlements that exist in the middle of the West Bank, as opposed to the majority of them in blocs that are close to the 1967 lines are more or less under constant siege. While random terror attacks on Jewish targets in Jerusalem are a constant, the instances of rock throwing, firebombs, sniping or stabbings in which Jews are targets of Arab violence are a daily affair. Just as many on the left believe the only way for the two communities to live in peace is complete separation, so, too, does the settler community believe the only way to ensure their security is to keep Arabs away from them.
As Yaalon said the following to the Knesset in defense of the plan last fall:
“I have not prohibited Arabs in Judea and Samaria from traveling on public transportation and have no intention to do so,” Yaalon told parliament at the time, but added that “you don’t have to be a security expert to realize that when you have 20 Arabs in a bus driven by a Jew, and maybe two or three other [Jewish] passengers and a soldier carrying a weapon, you are guaranteed a terror attack.”
He might be right about that. But as much as Israelis, even those living in the settlements, are entitled to do whatever is possible to ensure their safety, they need to mindful of where the tipping point between security and damage to the country’s international image lies. Suffice it to say that anything that smacks of discrimination in this manner does grievous damage to the state’s image abroad and undermines its just claim to being the only democracy in the Middle East.
Despite the lies that the Palestinians broadcast and which are picked up by anti-Semites and Israel-haters elsewhere, the Jewish state has no official segregation. Inside Israel, Arabs vote, serve in the Knesset and in every possible government post. Though relations between the communities are soured by the war on Israel’s existence that the Arab and Muslim worlds have been waging on it since its inception, Israeli Arabs enjoy full rights and freedom.
West Bank Palestinian Arabs are in a different position, but it is one largely of their own choosing. They could have accepted independence and peace at any time in the last 15 years since Israel has repeatedly offered them a state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem. If they had, the current argument about buses would be moot. But they have refused each time because their leaders lack the will or the ability to make peace. Even today, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, lauded as an advocate of peace by President Obama and other world leaders, refuses to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. Even if one advocates for withdrawal of some of the outlying settlements that would not be included in Israel in the event of a peace deal, the idea that the residents of these communities should be subjected to murder and terror with impunity is abhorrent.
That is something that should be taken into account by those who rightly criticize Yaalon’s idea. But even more than that, they need to remember that such an idea only became thinkable because of many years of Palestinian violence whose only purpose is to kill Jews and destroy Israel, not to adjust its borders or to merely deny them their right to live in the heart of their ancient homeland. Those comparing the plight of Palestinians to that of African-Americans in the segregated South are forgetting the fact that American blacks were not trying to destroy America, just claim their equal rights as citizens. Those who sought to keep blacks separated from whites were not defending their existence as Israelis must nor were they subjected to the kind of terror that Jews have been.
We should condemn any scheme, even one born out of self-defense, that smacks of legal segregation. But those who do so should always remember that this situation was created by and perpetuated by an unceasing Palestinian war of terror that must end if peace is ever to be possible.
