Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
07 January '10
Last week's High Court decision to open Route 443 to both Jewish and Arab traffic generated lots of squawk. However, another decision, only months earlier, to forbid "mixed" traffic failed to excite much interest. The petitions in both cases were nearly identical, yet the rulings appear completely contradictory. One common denominator, though, does stand out - both decisions are detrimental to Jews. No way can the High Court of Justice be accused of inconsistency - not even when it blatantly applies diametrically different logic to different litigants.
Nearly a decade ago the IDF banned residents of settlements like Dolev and Talmon from using the highway that bypasses Beitunya - a village near Ramallah with quite a murderous record. The second intifada raged then and the defense establishment reckoned that, for their own safety, it would be better for Jews not to make their way to Jerusalem via a route adjacent to hostile hamlets. The joker in the pack is that the road in question is a detour ordained directly after the advent of Osloite bliss to deliberately keep Jews from chafing against their new "peace partners."
The long and the short of it is that the road constructed to protect Jews from terrorist predations was closed to Jews - to protect them from terrorist predations. Some 6,000 residents of the Binyamin region's westerly section were therefore forced to get to Jerusalem by travelling in the opposite direction. What should have been a half-hour car ride was prolonged to at least an hour-and-a-half. Instead of going eastward, they were forced to travel west and then south via a convoluted course to Modi'in, from whence they enter Route 443 and, at long last, turn east toward the capital. A 10-kilometer drive was effectively quadrupled.
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