Arriving home in Israel after a semester teaching in New York, I got in a taxi at Ben-Gurion Airport and asked the cabbie to drive me to Jerusalem. "Take the main road, not Route 443," I said. Route 443 runs through the West Bank. When it was transformed from a country road to a highway in the 1980s, Palestinian land was expropriated under the legal fiction that the project's main purpose was to serve Palestinian residents of the area. Since 2002, however, the Israeli army has barred Palestinians from using it. I take 443 only when I must to cover a story.
"I don't like 443 either," the cabbie said. "It's dangerous now that the Supreme Court made them let Arabs use it." He pronounced "Supreme Court" like a curse. Such antipathy is common among Israeli right-wingers, who regard the Court as a club of bleeding hearts. I prefer a calm driver, especially on a road into the mountains, so I didn't argue politics with him.
a. Did he know, if at all, that the cabbie was a "right-winger"?
b. Could not a left-winger be anitpathetic to the Court, say, if it approved Jewish residency in certain areas beyond the Green Line, or authorize the route of the Security Barrier in certain locations beyond the Green Line?
c. Do all right-wingers hold that view?
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7 comments:
As someone said recently to me:
"I would rather be far right than far wrong!"
oh, come on, you know what he meant. still, having read his bood "the end of days" i know just what a slimy, disingenuous media whore he is. if you want to attack this guy there's plenty of legitimate openings, you don't have to stoop to criticizing his generalizations about israeli cab drivers. (of course the driver meant exactly what gorenburg thought he meant. so what?)
and yes, i think antipathy to the supreme court is a fairly standard israeli right wing view. a.), so what, and b.) do you disagree?
also, it doesn't say what gorenburg's reasons are for not wanting to use 443. i think he wants us to think they're ideological ("i refuse to use an apartheied road!") when they are just as likely fear of stoning, shooting or bombing- a much more legitimate and common reason for avoiding the road, especially among taxi drivers. if he wants to avoid ALL roads in israel and the "occupied territories" for which "palestinian land" was expropriated, he might as well stay home and turn in his journalistic credentials. in fact, i recommend this.
does someone want to tell him that highway 1 runs over the green line too?
But Gorenkapo , in the spirit or tolerance would say that the moslim only road to mecca is OK.
Here, I do not actually imagine it may work.
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