Bus segregation means apartheid, says Livni

Demands for separate buses for Palestinians are discriminatory and have echoes of apartheid, the Israeli Justice Minister has said.

Earlier this week, Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon accepted requests from settlers that West Bank Arabs travelling to and from Israel should be segregated on public transport.

The Defence Ministry claimed the separate buses were a security measure to ensure Palestinians working in Israel did not stay there overnight illegally. To enforce this, Palestinians allowed to work in Israel would have to leave Israel via the same checkpoint they used to enter. As none of the regular Israeli buses go through the checkpoints, this would effectively mean separate buses.

The IDF, however, said that the Palestinian workers posed no security risk.

Ms Livni told Army Radio yesterday: “I applied to the attorney general… because I understood that this was the result of pressure by settlers who don’t want to travel with Arabs on the bus. I read the transcripts of what was said in that Knesset committee.

“It’s intolerable, the claims that they [the settlers] need their own buses, because one [Palestinian] didn’t get up for a woman or an elderly person, and another wasn’t nice to them. This is apartheid!” She said.

“If this is due to security considerations, that’s something I can not only live with, but I’ll even support,” she continued.

“But if we’re talking about settler pressure, that it’s not convenient or pleasant for them in the very places they sought to live, where there are Palestinians – that’s something I find unacceptable, and I’ll work against it. This is discrimination that’s forbidden by Israeli law.”

Transcripts published in Haaretz in November 2013 from a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee’s subcommittee on the West Bank to discuss the shortage of buses in the settlements showed several complaints from settlers about Palestinian behaviour on buses.

One settler complained of one incident of sexual harassment and another of Palestinians not giving up their seat for pregnant women.