#CarProtest: West Bank Muslims Spin A Yarn About Israeli Roads

Well, Maan--the Palestinian Arab paper--almost had it right.

They reported:

Drivers protest Israeli-only roads in West Bank

Around 60 people from across the West Bank on Tuesday tried to drive from Jericho to Ramallah on an Israeli-only road to protest Israel's restrictions on Palestinian movement.

But then they decided to just repeat the story the Arabs were spinning:

Popular resistance committees organized the motorcade of around 50 cars to protest the network of roads in the West Bank designated for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers.

The problem is that the facts got lost as the Arabs put on a show--as illustrated and explained by this video by Vlad Tepes: West Bank Muslims Spin A Yarn About Israeli Roads:




The point is that it's true that Israelis have complete unfettered access to those roads--and that includes Arab Israelis as well. As the video points out at the end, Palestinian Arabs who live on the West Bank have been known to use those road for terrorist attacks and that is why their access is more limited.

Back in 2010, Michael Totten wrote about this--and is the source for the text at the end of the above video--rebutting the claim made by Helen Thomas repeating the same lie about "Jewish only" roads in The Myth of Jewish-Only Roads:

The roads she’s referring to in the West Bank are Israeli, and they’re not just for Jews. Israeli Arabs can drive on them, and so can non-Jewish foreigners, including Arab and Muslim foreigners. Palestinians were once able to drive on them but have not been allowed to do so since the second intifada, when suicide bombers used them to penetrate Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in order to massacre people.

There are also, by the way, Palestinian roads in the West Bank that Israelis can’t use.

I don’t know if Helen Thomas knows this and is lying or if she’s just an ignoramus. What I’ll bet she doesn’t know is that Arab residents of Jerusalem can use both the Israeli roads and the Palestinian roads. They’re the only people who live in the area who can do this. (Foreigners also are allowed to use both.)

The fact that there are no "Jewish only" roads in Israel will not stop the Arab media--and may not stop some of the more careless among the Western media.

And the fact that the existence of roads in the West Bank that are forbidden to Jews will of course not be reported--let alone the fact that the PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews




Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestinian.