Litnet

Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.
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Every exercise of the police power must be reasonable, and extend only to such laws as are enacted in good faith for the promotion for the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class.
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In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable…
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We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

New bus lines for Palestinians, created at the urging of Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank, have sparked a debate over segregation in Israel and refocused attention on the inequalities that govern Palestinians and Israelis in the territory. The two new lines began operating on Monday, ferrying Palestinian day laborers commuting between the West Bank and blue-collar jobs in Tel Aviv. Previously, those Palestinians commuted via a series of private minibuses—whose fares are far higher than on the new public bus lines—or on public bus lines serving primarily Jewish settlers in the northern West Bank.

Klink dit nie bekend nie.

"Separate but equal?" asked Israel's centrist daily Yediot Ahranot newspaper on Monday. "On the bus to Israeli apartheid," read an editorial headline in the left-of-center Haaretz paper.

Both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians can still ride on both the new and the old lines, said Israel's Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz, a conservative stalwart within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. That means they are not legally segregated, he says.

West Bank Palestinians vie to take a new bus service begun Monday to reach their jobs in Israel. Critics say it smacked of segregation; the government said it only added travel options.

"Adding new bus lines servicing Palestinian areas is not segregation," a Katz spokesman said. "Anyone can ride on any bus. There are now just more buses."

The study, headed by Tel Aviv University Professor Camil Fuchs, found that Jewish Israeli citizens would overwhelmingly supported an apartheid regime were the territories in Judea and Samaria annexed, meaning that they would to see Israeli Arabs get different and worse treatment systematically in civil society than Israeli Jews. Importantly, most Israeli Jews responded that they would not want to see the annexing, but were it to take place, they viewed certain segregation favorably.

The majority of the Jewish public, 59 percent, wants preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half the Jews, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don’t want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don’t want their children in the same class with Arab children. A third of the Jewish public wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset and a large majority of 69 percent objects to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

A sweeping 74 percent majority is in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. A quarter – 24 percent – believe separate roads are “a good situation” and 50 percent believe they are “a necessary situation.”

Almost half – 47 percent – want part of Israel’s Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority and 36 percent support transferring some of the Arab towns from Israel to the PA, in exchange for keeping some of the West Bank settlements.