By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man

|Published October 26, 2014

Segregating the evening commute to the West Bank
Jews and Palestinians who commute from the West Bank to work in central
Israel each day will soon ride separate buses home. Lets not give too much
credit to Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, however. The decision to segregate
the evening commute wasnt all that creative. He only completed his
predecessors decision to segregate the morning commute.

Palestinian workers wait in line to board an Israeli bus line meant for Palestinians only
after crossing the Eyal checkpoint from the West Bank into Israel proper. (Photo by
Activestills.org)
Its not really segregation. Not on paper at least. Or at least the paper doesnt use
the word segregation. In practice, however, people of one national origin will not be
allowed to ride on the same bus lines as people of another national origin for the
benefit and at the request of one group, at the expense and against the desires of
the other. Call that what you will.
Heres how it works. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, the de facto and de jure
sovereign ruler of the West Bank, could have easily ordered his generals to revise
Israeli military law to legally ban Palestinians from riding on the same buses as their
Jewish Israeli neighbors. (Its important to remember at this junction, no pun
intended, that we are talking about two groups of people who live in the same place
the West Bank and who each day commute back and forth to their workplaces in
the same place central Israel.)
If that military order had been issued so explicitly, however, it would actually be
called segregation and understood to be segregation by the general public, which at
least in theory, sometimes opposes segregation. If the defense minister had written
such an order it probably would have even used the Hebrew word hafrada, which
inconveniently means both separation and segregation. That wouldnt have looked
good. So Yaalon found another way, one that didnt require him to use such politically
loaded words.
Read more on Palestinian laborers working in Israel
Instead, the defense minister ordered that Palestinian commuters return to their
West Bank homes through a specific, dedicated checkpoint a different checkpoint
than the Jewish commuters with whom they shared their evening bus rides until now.
Technically speaking, Palestinians with valid work permits are still allowed to ride
Israeli buses; they just arent allowed to go through the checkpoints through which
those buses pass. Which means they will have to travel a different route, and
therefore, ride separate buses.
Lets not give too much credit to Yaalon, however. The decision to segregate the
evening commute wasnt all that creative. He was only completing his predecessors
decision to segregate the morning commute.
See more photos of the segregated checkpoint here.


Palestinian workers board a bus at the Eyal checkpoint, March 4, 2012. (Photo by
Activestills.org)
On the sidelines of Yaalons decision, an argument took place between two people in
uniform about whether the segregation is necessitated or even motivated by
security. According to Maj.-Gen. Nitzan Alon, who happens to be the commander in
charge of the Israeli armys entire operations in the West Bank (or in other words,
the occupation), Palestinian and Israeli commuters sharing buses poses no security
risk, Haaretz reported Sunday. Another man in uniform, one who apparently has
neither name nor rank, declared that the only considerations in the new policy are
security considerations. Go figure.
Dont expect a huge fallout
The new policy will have only a couple of effects, neither of which are significant
enough to endanger the two-state solution or move a single foreign government to
change the course of their Mideast foreign policy.
First and foremost, the new segregated evening commute will do exactly what it was
designed to: segregate the evening commute. Jewish settlers will be able to enjoy
their ride home from Tel Aviv through the fertile West Bank foothills of Palestinian
olive country without the annoyance of having to listen to other commuters speaking
Arabic. Haaretz quoted MK Moti Yogev (The Jewish Home), a settler himself and
member of the Israeli parliaments ruling coalition, after riding one of the yet-to-be-
segregated buses: Riding these buses is unreasonable. They are full of Arabs.
The second consequence is just slightly more politically correct, or less, depending on
how you like your racism, civil rights and labor conditions. Palestinian laborers, who
are forbidden from remaining inside Israel proper at night, will be forced to take
longer routes home to their families every evening. Already, they arrive at the
checkpoint before the crack of dawn in order to make it to work in the morning. Just
another hardship of the occupation nothing to write to the UN about.
As Amjad Iraqi wrote here on +972 when the morning buses were segregated last
year:
This is certainly not the worst case of state-sanctioned discrimination in the
Occupied Territories, and it wont be the last. What makes the bus case notable,
however, is that it starkly presents the pervasiveness of the states segregationist
mentality by evoking the memory of the infamous buses under the Jim Crow laws of
the southern United States.
On a related note, Arab minority rights organization Adalah filed a lawsuit against
the segregation of an Israeli youth soccer league along Jewish-Palestinian lines. The
decision to segregate the Jewish and Arab youth teams into different leagues was
apparently made in response to complaints by Jewish parents, according to a
statement by Adalah.
Related:
Palestinian-only buses serve to incentivize segregation
Photos: Israels Palestinian only segregated bus lines
West Bank and East Jerusalem buses are already segregated
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