By now, we have all heard someone accuse Israel of running an apartheid state. Proponents of this argument rely on a handful of misapplied concepts. One of the more compelling examples involves the Palestinian territory of the West Bank and the transit it used to share with Israel.

The Palestinian Territories are made up of two distinct regions: Gaza, along the southwest shore, and the West Bank that lies along Jordan’s eastern border. The West Bank’s (WB) territorial rules are complicated by the fact that the UN requires Israel to administer portions of it.

The WB is organized into three areas, some which are legal lands where Israelis can live and some where it is illegal — the latter leading to most of the illegal settlements we hear about. Because of the complicated architecture between what constitutes Israel and what constitutes the West Bank, both sides have struggled to secure their borders.

Proponents of the apartheid charge then go on to mention that Israel built its own network of roads and highways to circumvent Palestinian areas — roads that require Palestinians to pass through a check point to use. They are attempting to suggest a separate but equal treatment as evidence of an apartheid system.

They do not mention that before the separate roads there were numerous kidnappings and fatal attacks on Israeli civilians driving on the shared roads, attacks that culminated in the beating and evisceration of two off duty Israeli reservists that were lost and accidentally drove through part of the West Bank.

After members of a local militia dragged the men from a local police station where they’d been detained for getting lost, the militants beat, dismebowled, and lynched them. A famous photo captured militant Aziz Salha who lifted his hands up to the cheering crowd: his hands are covered in an almost cartoonish amount of blood as though it’s protest makeup instead of the blood from the violent lynching of two Israelis.

After this, the Israeli military cordoned off certain roads so that “misunderstandings” like the Ramallah Lynchings don’t occur again.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/969778.stm

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.