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CPTnet
28 November 2011
*PALESTINE REFLECTION: Freedom Riders take Israeli settler bus to Jerusalem*

 by Jo Ann Fricke

On Tuesday, 15 November 2011, six Palestinians stood at the bus stop outside
the settlements of Psagot and Migron, and boarded a bus used by settlers to
travel to Jerusalem.  When CPT’s Hebron team heard about the action on the
internet, they sent three members to accompany the six Freedom Riders, as the
activists referred to themselves.

Although no law explicitly forbids Palestinians from boarding the Israeli
buses in the West Bank, racial and ethnic discrimination and the fact that
Palestinians are not allowed to travel to Jerusalem where the Central Bus
Station is, create a separate system of transportation that is off-limits to
the Palestinians, but open to Israelis.

The six were able to board the bus, along with numerous journalists and
photographers and depart from the bus stop.  However, at the first
checkpoint, Israeli soldiers and police stopped the bus and boarded it. 
After about forty-five minutes, the bus moved one last time just down the
road to a parking lot, where it sat for at least another hour before police
carried the six Palestinians off the bus and arrested them.

Some Palestinian friends of the Hebron team questioned the effectiveness of
the action, but the event was widely covered in the world press, including by
the /BBC, Washington Post, Los Angele Times,/ and the /Christian Science
Monitor/.  In a press statement read before the activists boarded the bus,
spokeswoman Hurriyeh Ziadah noted,

>Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “He who passively accepts evil is as much
>involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.  He who accepts evil
>without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
>
>We urge the people of the world not to accept the evil that is our
>occupation, dispossession, and oppression, and to divest yourselves and your
>governments from the corporations that enable Israel to continue doing this
>to us.  Egged and Veolia are two transportation companies that serve
>Israel’s segregated, colonial, infrastructure.  By passively accepting
>their presence and not protesting against them, you are all indirectly
>complicit in the crimes they commit against us, and the profits they make
>from the violation of our rights; violations that the Freedom Riders will
>expose today.
>
> Our rights will not voluntarily be handed to us, so we are heading out to
>demand them.
>
 

 


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CPT's MISSION: What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline
and sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war? Christian
Peacemaker Teams (CPT) seeks to enlist the whole church in organized,
nonviolent alternatives to war and places teams of trained peacemakers in
regions of lethal conflict.

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