Year: 2013

That’s a reminiscent photograph, isn’t it – of a disenfranchised minority, now forced to ride not at the back of the bus but in a completely segregated one? I mentioned last night that Israel’s Ministry of Transportation introduced separate buses for Palestinians and Jewish settlers traveling between Israel and the West Bank, after the latter complained to the government that Arab passengers were a threat. Oren Ziv reports and provides photos of the scenes yesterday:

Such measures may be shocking to those unaware that in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, separate-but-unequal bus lines already exist, as detailed by Mya Guarnieri. But, as with the many forms of de facto discrimination in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, these buses are not legally segregated. So predictably, Israel’s transportation minister insists that, even with the new bus lines, “Palestinians entering Israel will able to ride on every public transportation line, including existing lines in Judea and Samaria [Israeli terms for the West Bank occupied Palestinian territories]“.

A simple poignant anecdote:

Back on the 210 bus to Eyal, Middle Eastern music was playing to a half-full bus of middle aged men who fit a profile that is classified as a low security risk. “It’s ironic,” notes Mussa Mohammed, a tile layer from Nablus. “Inside Israel we are free to ride the buses and train, but on the way back to our homes in the West Bank we are separated out.”

Jake Wallis Simons is wary of the word “apartheid” and tries to place the move in context of Israel’s balancing act between combating terror and protecting civil rights:

The question, as with my experience at Ben Gurion airport, is where one draws the line. In Israel, this matter is debated frequently and officially by moral philosophers and religious figures, particularly when it comes to military operations. They get it wrong sometimes, and spectacularly so. But often, on a day-to-day basis, they get it right.

Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the timing is strange. Apart from the blast on the bus in Tel Aviv during the last Gaza offensive, there hadn’t been a suicide attack on Israel’s bus network for six and a half years, which is a striking figure given that 29,000 Palestinians commute to Israel daily.

Anna Lekas Miller calls it is symptomatic of an already “separate but equal” system:

[S]egregation between Israeli and Palestinian passengers on public transportation is hardly new. In Jerusalem, the “Central” bus station operates buses connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Dead Sea and several Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank. These buses do not have to stop at checkpoints—as the passengers are Israeli citizens, soldiers and settlers. Some of these buses—the settler buses—are heavily subsidized by the Israeli government, and thus often travel the city half empty. It’s easy for these buses to have a set schedule. The bus station itself is indoors, air-conditioned and even equipped with a Kosher McDonalds.

Aeyal Gross compares the new policy to a 2009 move to bar Palestinians from using a key highway in Israel, which Israel’s courts struck down as illegal:

Differing circumstances aside, the policy reversed by the High Court in the case of Route 443 is similar to the Transportation Ministry’s new policy regarding certain bus lines, insofar as both involve the development of a means of transportation for the citizens of the occupying state and its separation from the local population. This violates the rules of international law whereby occupation is a temporary situation only, and the occupying power must administer the territory for the benefit of the local population.

In this sense the bus issue is only one more component of Israel’s de facto annexation of the territories, an annexation accompanied by the creation of a regime of segregation – which is of course unequal – between Jews and Palestinians.

Corey Robin juxtaposes the Haaretz report with the text of Plessy v. Ferguson.

(Photo: Two Palestinian activists sit inside as Israeli bus as it rides between a bus stop outside the West Bank Jewish settlement of Migron, near Ramallah, and a checkpoint leading to Jerusalem, on November 15, 2011. Palestinian ‘Freedom Riders’ reenacted US civil rights movement’s boarding of segregated buses in the American south by riding Israeli settler buses to Jerusalem. Several Israeli transportation companies operate dozens of lines that run through the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, many of them subsidized by the state. While it is not officially forbidden for Palestinians to use Israeli public transportation in the West Bank, these lines are effectively segregated, since many of them pass through Jewish-only settlements, to which Palestinian entry is prohibited by a military decree. By Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images.)

Alex Massie worries that most Brits now see the relatively moderate Tory party as “pretty right-wing”:

The people may be wrong but that’s what they think. And why wouldn’t they? The Tories have been very good at telling the country what they don’t like but rather less good at telling us what they do like. … They’re against foreign judges, foreign workers and foreign students. They’re against people on benefits or in receipt of tax credits and they’re against “free” university education. Worst of all, perhaps, they’re against taxing millionaires and remain blind to the damage cutting the top rate of tax for the very richest Britons has done them. Then, though a little unfairly, they’re seen as being against gay people’s desire to marry each other and, more generally, they’re seen as being against (or at least uncomfortable with) much of modern British life.

And he believes these positions are obscuring the party’s accomplishments:

[T]he government has some good stories to tell. Recent setbacks notwithstanding, there’s a good story to be told about education reform. The same is true of employment growth and even, if the framing is done properly, of welfare reform. But we don’t hear very much of these things and nor do we hear much talk of what the government is actually doing. Instead the party bangs on and on and on about what it is against but only rarely about what it is for.

The Economist pegs the party’s recent rightward shift as a strategy to win a crucial election in a battleground borough:

[David Cameron] would be well advised to consider the party’s dark night of the soul in the early 2000s. In the eminently winnable 2005 election (a time when, polling suggests, Britons were both more exercised about Europe and less socially liberal than they are now), the Conservative Party ran an UKIPish campaign under the slogan “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Back then the answer from electorally-decisive voters was: “err, no”. The same, it seems, was true in Eastleigh yesterday. The party should be wary of making the same mistake in 2015.

(Image from the tumblr of English teenager Rachel Dawn, who titles it “British politics in a nutshell”)

Taylor Bigler of The Daily Caller “reports” that potential Senate candidate Ashley Judd has done various nude scenes as an actress. Alyssa pounces:

Attacking Judd for her nude scenes is part and parcel of the right’s current strategy to discredit promising female advocates. Like Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke, the Caller’s attempts to impugn Judd as an exhibitionist are an attempt to make her seem less serious by impugning her sexual chastity (that this tactic remains in the playbook is a whole other world of crazy). But the evidence is even more specious and pathetic here. Fluke, who became engaged shortly after enduring nationally-broadcast attacks on her character, stumped for birth control access in the real world. Judd took her clothes off as part of fiction. The Daily Caller may not know the difference, but voters do. And Judd, who already knows a thing or two about the insanity of media scrutiny, is getting a real, and sadly valuable education in what you have to be willing to take if you want to be active in American public life as a woman.

Alex Pappas of the Caller claims that the Judd hit-piece was simply “entertainment.” Alyssa goes another round:

[T]he tittering assertion that the Caller’s stories about Judd’s entertainment career are just for Monday afternoon giggles is an idea belied by the Daily Caller’s very site structure, which is using stories about the fact that she’s done on-screen nudity and dated Michael Bolton to drive coverage to more substantive—though I hesitate to dignify it with that term—reporting about Judd’s political positioning for a potential race.