Thursday, January 17, 2008 www.lennybendavid.com
Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama

Two months ago in Annapolis Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the
plight of Palestinians to the experience of African-Americans some 40 years
ago in the segregated South. "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot
go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said.
"I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." The reporter
continued, "As a black child [pictured with her mother] in the South, [she
remembers] being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in
certain restaurants."

Well, Ms. Rice, I recently returned from the South - southern Israel - and I
saw a far different scene from the Jim Crow measures you experienced in the
land of the Confederacy. My wife and I drove some 200 miles south from
Jerusalem to Eilat, Israel's "little Riviera," for a week's vacation. It
coincided with the Muslim holiday of Id al Adha, and we shared Eilat with
thousands of Israeli citizens of Muslim faith and Palestinian national
identity.

I recall the de facto segregation in the Takoma swimming pool in northwest
Washington DC where I grew up. In our Eilat hotel, on the other hand, it was
impossible to differentiate between the Israeli Jewish and Muslim kids
splashing in the pool. In the 1960s, ten years after Rosa Parks, seating on
D.C. Transit buses and at the Peoples Drug Store soda counter reflected a
habitual racial separation. There was nothing similar in the Eilat hotel
dining room on Friday night which was filled with Jewish families saying
Kiddush at their traditional Shabbat meal alongside Arab families partaking
of the Ashkenazi gefilte fish and the Sephardi couscous. The Israeli Arabs'
4x4 monster SUVs cast shadows over our modest sedan at the famous 101
roadside rest stop in the Negev desert where all Israelis - Muslim and
Jewish - shared the restaurant, kids' rides and washrooms.

Anyone suggesting that Jim Crow is present in Israel should be eating crow
(except for the fact that it's not kosher). That includes the Washington
Post correspondent Scott Wilson who recently filed a story, "For Israel's
Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion."

Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Israelis

Standing in line at an Eilat supermarket check-out we stood behind an
Israeli Arab woman who spoke no Hebrew or English, only Arabic. She was a
Palestinian from the West Bank who was married to an Israeli Muslim citizen,
one of many West Bankers who have found a surreptitious way to accomplish
the Palestinian goal of a "right of return" to the area of pre-1967 Israel.

Instead of traveling a route past the Dead Sea and parallel to the Jordanian
border, our drive went straight south along Route 60 from Jerusalem. The
first 30 miles were through the southern half of the West Bank, known for
centuries as "Judea." That took us past Hebron (Al Khalil on map), Arab
villages and Jewish villages and towns -- misnamed for years as
"settlements." The term connotes temporary, military-style encampments. They're
nothing of the sort, with many stylish residences housing second and third
generations of Israeli Jews.

Hundreds of Palestinian cars, trucks, and the distinctive yellow Palestinian
taxis shared the road with us. My wife and I, in one of the few cars with
the yellow and black Israeli license plates, kept looking for the supposedly
omnipresent Israeli Army roadblocks and checkpoints. Frankly, we were a
little anxious, and we were a lot curious about Ms. Rice's complaint that
Palestinians "can't go on a road." Along the whole route of this major
thoroughfare - some 30 - 40 miles we did not see one roadblock or
checkpoint! Only at the "crossing points" between the West Bank and pre-1967
Israel did we see checkpoints, established to prevent suicide bombers and
terrorist groups from attacking Israeli targets. One such checkpoint
recently discovered 6.5 tons of the bomb-making chemical, potassium nitrate,
hidden in bags of sugar sent by the European Union as humanitarian aid.

Yes, there are checkpoints - and choke points - around some Palestinian
towns, and travel to areas adjacent to Jerusalem and other major Israeli
cities is often made difficult as the Israeli army attempts to thwart
terrorists going into Israel and Palestinian car thieves fleeing Israel with
their loot. But we travelled the length of a large, contiguous Palestinian
region where Palestinian school children, merchants, truckers and commuters
experienced no interference whatsoever as they traveled.

Ms. Rice, thank God Almighty that the U.S. civil rights movement was led by
the likes of Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Imagine how
the U.S. government would have reacted if the movement were led by the
militant Black Panther's Booby Seale or Huey Newton, or a terrorist group
such as the Symbionese Liberation Army led by Donald "Field Marshal Cinque"
DeFreeze. Government agencies probably would have set up roadblocks and
checkpoints around every American urban center. Ms. Rice, if a non-violent
Palestinian national movement were ever to emerge and really purge the
terrorists, then your comparisons would be worthy of consideration.

Lenny Ben-David
I*Consult
Business and Government Relations
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