Sounds so credible, so beautiful, so open-and-shut, so obvious, so compelling: Six Palestinians said, “We are like them, exactly like them.”
The “we” are the six Palestinians arrested for trying to board West Bank buses designated for Israelis only.
The “them” are the Freedom Riders in the American South in the early 1960s — those Civil Rights heroes who suffered violence in order to integrate bus service.
“They saw an inequality,” said one of the six Palestinians. “They saw segregation and racism, and they fought it through nonviolent actions. We want to show how unfair the Israeli system is, the system we are forced to live under.”
“I want to show them that as a human being I should be given equal rights,” said another one of the arrested Palestinians.
Just one minor detail, one small fact, one piece of trivia:
The black victims of segregation and racism in the American South did not plant bombs on the buses they tried to integrate, did not throw bombs at those buses, did not shoot women and children on those buses, did not steer those buses off the highway into ravines, killing the buses’ passengers, did not leap for joy upon observing their compatriots kill the people on those buses.
Palestinians, yes, suffer from separate bus lines, due to the violent, deliberate, massive, sustained attacks by Palestinians on Israeli buses. We wish it were different.
Separate Israeli buses in Palestinian areas are a means of self-defense, not inequality.
The Palestinian attempt to “integrate” these buses is an exercise in memory erasure — and not just that. Absent a Palestinian declaration of intent to live with Israel in peace, there is no assurance that today, in 2011, these would-be Palestinian riders on Israeli buses would not facilitate more bombings of Israeli buses, more murders of unarmed Israeli bus riders, including women and children, all unarmed.
Hamas says: Israel is to be destroyed. The Palestinian Authority says: Israel is not to be negotiated with, not to be recognized as a Jewish state, not to be granted secure borders. The would-be Palestinian bus riders want “equality” under that uniquely perverse, politically Palestinian definition of equality:
“We get rights, we ride your buses, but we do not affirm your right to these buses, your right to the roads they travel on, or your right to the homes these roads connect.”
Sorry, the analogy to the American South is flawed from beginning to end. Let the Palestinians affirm not only non-violent action on buses, but also lay down their rockets fired into Israel from Gaza and their knives from the West Bank used to butcher Israelis sleeping in their beds on the Sabbath, then we can talk about equal access to buses.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News