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Santa Barbara News-Press · Santa Barbara, California · 5 March 2013

CP-2013-002

Bus service for Palestinians raises charges of racism

McClatchy News Service, Tel Aviv

Bus service for Palestinians raises charges of racism — Santa Barbara News-Press, 5 March 2013
Santa Barbara News-Press · Santa Barbara, California · 5 March 2013

Transcribed from the clipping

“For more than a decade, Khaled Abdi and his uncle, Sami, have navigated the circuitous routes of the West Bank to get to low-paying construction jobs in central Israel. They’d wake at 3 a.m. to leave their homes near Nablus to catch one of Israel’s state-run buses, which also ferried Israeli settlers. It was a rare point of interaction between the two communities… Palestinian officials call it ‘blatant racism.’ Israeli officials call it simply providing better service to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who commute daily for their jobs in Israel. ‘It is yet another rung in the ladder that Israel is slowly climbing until all the world will call it an apartheid state,’ said one Palestinian official, who asked not to be quoted by name… But Sari Bashi, the executive director of Gisha, a group that advocates lifting Israel’s restrictions on the Palestinian territories, said the buses were another example of a ‘dual system of rights for Israelis and Palestinians.’ ‘These settlers and Israeli citizens apparently feel safe enough to allow Palestinians to build their homes and clear their land, so it’s unclear why they can’t ride the same buses,’ she said… ‘Really, what choice do we have?’ he asked. ‘Israel creates the system and we live in it. We need these jobs, so we will use whatever bus they tell us to.’”

Photograph caption

Palestinian laborers board a Palestinian-only bus en route to the West Bank from Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday. Associated Press.

Context added by this archive

Two named construction workers, an uncle and a nephew, and the word apartheid in an American paper in 2013.

Cite this item

"Bus service for Palestinians raises charges of racism," Santa Barbara News-Press, 5 March 2013. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2013-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2013-002

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2013-002.

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