Apartheid in London? Making Jews “feel” safe.

With antisemitic incidents surging in London, the British capital city has introduced a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.

Thus began an article in yesterday’s Algemeiner written by Algemeiner staff. Note how they included the word, safe, within the scare quotes, implying for me that they think that the solution found for Jews afraid to travel on public transportation in London is a real solution and not what it seems to me to be — a sham, that is, to “feel” safe. The article did not even hint that authorities are seeking ways to make London’s Jews actually BE SAFE.

Cynically, one of the commenters below the article asked if ghettoizing the Jews would be next.

The new bus route links two mainly Jewish communities in the city. With this new bus, travellers between the two will no longer have to change buses at a stop where they are apparently targetted for verbal abuse and more. Given that this bus line will likely be used by non-Jews as well, we cannot really call it an apartheid route. But we can only hope that those who use it will not be the same Jew-hating bullies that attack Jews on the streets. What if those bullies board the bus on this line BECAUSE they know that it will ferry Jews between the two communities?

And if Jews are attacked on this special new bus route, what will happen then?

In other words, this is not a solution to the reported huge increase in antisemitism to which British Jews have been subjected over the past year.

Reading the article reminded me of something people find abhorrent about Israel.

Apartheid in Israel

Decades ago, the myth arose that Israel was building apartheid roads in Judea-Samaria, roads that only Jews could drive on. Such roads do not exist. Palestinian Arabs can drive on all roads in all of Judea-Samaria (aka “The West Bank”) up to the entrance to Jewish towns where entry is restricted for security reasons.

Jews, however, cannot drive wherever they want.

Big red signs notify Jews of the prohibition to drive on certain roads and it is a criminal offence to disobey these signs. Israeli Arabs, however, have no such prohibition and they freely enter Area A (under full Palestinian Authority control) and Arab towns that are off limits to Jews.

There are Arab-town by-pass roads that have been on the drawing table for years but somehow never completed. Palestinian Arab drivers would not be prohibited from using them, a lie that is promoted by anti-Israel organzations. In fact, everyone would benefit because it would shorten travelling routes and not slow down traffic as happens when driving through towns. What this would mean for Jews is that they would be less subject to rock-throwing and Molotov-cocktail throwing that makes driving through an Arab town on their way home or to work so dangerous. Have you heard of Hawara? That is one such dangerous-for-Jews town.

Funnily, it seems that nobody — not London’s mayor, not the transportation planning department, not the London Jewish Forum, or the Board of Deputies of British Jews, all of whom approved the project — seemed to notice the irony in their new bus-line-for-Jews-because-there-is-too-much-antisemitic-violence proposal for London given widespread criticism of apartheid roads (that do not exist in real life) in Judea-Samaria. I am not saying that the particular individuals involved have voiced such views, but their approval of the London project does seem to approve of an approach to coping with Jew-hate that involves hiding the Jews away (in their own buses) rather than tackling the problem of hatred head-on.