Jim Crow in Jerusalem

Segregation in Palestine and Jim Crow America

“New Haven itself is a crime scene, the site of historic and continuing racism, segregation, and social inequality.” So wrote a scholar of the city at the turn of the twenty-first century. This observation links America’s segregated past to its nominally desegregated present: anyone who travels from the New Haven train station to Yale University confronts the fractious legacy of racial segregation. While segregation in the United States predates 1896, the racial divide approved by the “separate but equal” ruling of the US Supreme Court (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) strengthened Jim Crow laws across the American South, and indirectly reinforced de facto segregation in the northern states. The racial divide was famously emblematized in a groundbreaking documentary photograph series, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959). The original photographs are currently held in New Haven, in the hallowed walls of Yale University.

Four years after Rosa Parks famously refused to cede her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger, Frank captured the starkly physical engineering of public space that segregation had set in place on a New Orleans trolley. The camera angle is evenly split between black and white, and iron bars divide each passenger from their neighbours. The riders stare at the cameraman, their countenances etched by public and private histories of grief. Ranging from defiance to desperation to denial, every face canvassed in the photographer’s gaze expresses a fraught relationship to a racially tainted American dream, adding dimensions to the axiom of geographer George Lipsitz: “race is produced by space [and] it takes places for racism to take place.”

When I encountered Frank’s “Trolley — New Orleans” in the Yale University Art Museum in the middle of 2012, I was immediately brought back to September 2011. On this month, I began what was intended to be a five-year fellowship at the Jerusalem-based Van Leer Institute for Advanced Studies. I welcomed the opportunity because it gave me the chance to live across the Jerusalem border in Bethlehem. (I ended up leaving after ten months, having observed horrific aspects of daily life in Palestine that had fallen beneath the radar of the news headlines.) Commuting between Jerusalem and Bethlehem introduced me to a range of discriminatory regimes, which were both different from and similar to the Jim Crow system of the American South that I knew from US history and, more distantly for me, South African apartheid.

Although South Africa provided the immediate context, the United Nations’ fullest discussion of apartheid is deliberately designed not to target any specific state. According to the UN’s International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973), apartheid is:

“a crime against humanity” organized around “policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination … for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons.”

Scholars and other observers are increasingly applying this definition to Israel. In his study of how the apartheid analogy pertains to Palestine/Israel, South African scholar Daryl Glaser argues that

“Israel proper more closely resembles Northern Ireland during the Protestant ascendancy, with Jews in the role of the Protestant majority and Arabs in the position of the Catholic minority, than it does apartheid South Africa.”

Glaser is right to discern a difference, yet the two systems depend on each other. For an American, segregation in Israel proper (as demarcated by the 1967 Green Line) evokes the de facto Jim Crow of the northern states. Meanwhile, segregationist policies in the occupied territories approach more closely to apartheid South Africa in certain respects and to de jure Jim Crow in the American South in others.

These various types of segregation unravel and reconstitute themselves across the entirety of Palestine/Israel, in a regime where internationally recognized borders are increasingly irrelevant to the facts on the ground. The phrase “travelling apartheid” expresses this fluidity and reflects a dimension of everyday life that often goes unremarked on both sides of the Green Line.

Israeli Jim Crow discriminates with great subtlety, and through heavy reliance on the latest technology, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied Territories. Often the subtlety is so great and the bargain so lucrative that the oppressed temporarily accept the terms of their subordination while keeping their energies in reserve for the battles they can afford to fight.

Whereas apartheid prevails in the Palestinian West Bank, the forms of population management that prevail in Israel more fully resemble de facto forms of Jim Crow. Both forms of social organization are pernicious and both stand in need of critique.

The traveler who journeys by bus from Palestine to Israel becomes immediately immersed in contemporary apartheid, and comes to see, how, in the words of anthropologist Julie Peteet, “to travel in Palestine is to be caught in a slow-moving vortex of filtering by the permit system and of funneling through the ubiquitous checkpoints, and to move among spaces with varying forms of sovereignty.”

There are two bus systems. The Israeli system is run by the Israeli company Egged with support, until 2015, from the French multinational corporation Veolia. Ironically, given its role in facilitating segregation, Egged literally means “union.” By contrast, Palestinian buses are run as private initiatives by individual bus drivers, and are not united under a single company. They are recognizable by the blue letters emblazoned on a white surface, which read in Arabic: JERUSALEM — SOUTH.

The schedules for these buses are not posted for the simple reason that no schedules exist. Buses leave when they are full. The task of moving around the West Bank and from the West Bank into Israel is thereby simplified: there is no point in keeping track of time when time is so unpredictable. Simultaneously, time in the Occupied Territories is complicated: one is always bound to wait, sometimes for hours on end. The result? “The theft of time,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass.

By contrast with the decentralized Palestinian bus network, Egged is organized according to a rigid timetable that is standardized across Israel and publicly available online. Every bus in the Egged fleet is painted bright green, with silver panelling and bulletproof windows. To ride a bus in Tel Aviv is to ride a bus in Jaffa is to ride a bus in Jerusalem. The rider knows what to expect, and the buses run with clockwork-like precision. Whereas Palestinian bus drivers diligently distribute the same generic paper ticket to everyone, Egged receipts are electronically generated for each new passenger. Egged’s stops are announced on digitized screens hoisted above the driver, and accompanied by a recorded Hebrew voice that prepares passengers for each stop. (Although Arabic was, until 2018, an official language of Israel, it was nowhere to be seen on the Egged buses.) To get off at a specific stop on a Palestinian bus, by contrast, the rider must inform the driver in advance, and one’s voice must compete with the Arabic news broadcast blaring on the radio.

Also in contrast to the Egged bus system, which abounds in clearly marked bus stops all over Israel, often with benches and glass coverings, there are no bus stops that are marked as such for the Palestinian bus system. Palestinian buses usually stop near Egged bus stops, but this is not a fixed rule. In order to know where to wait for a Palestinian bus, one must either be Palestinian or be in contact with someone who regularly travels this route. For the Palestinian bus network, even though it runs precisely parallel in many places to the Egged system, there is no infrastructure to support bus stops, schedules, or even individually generated tickets.

Another difference between the two bus systems that illustrates the two-tiered apartheid under which Palestinians live is the demographics of its riders. The deliberate segregation of Jewish Israelis on Israeli buses and Arabs on Arab buses cannot be accounted for through socio-economic or other pragmatic explanations. For much of their routes through Jerusalem, the two buses follow parallel tracks.

For an American, this two-track bus system looks like yet another iteration of a “separate but equal” ideology. Although, unlike in the American South, the segregation regime maintains a pretence of conformity with international law, not once during the ten months I spent crossing the Israel’s border with the West Bank did I encounter a West Bank Palestinian on an Israeli bus or an Israeli on a bus from the West Bank, even when the Palestinian bus route was restricted to Jerusalem. Even when travelling through Jerusalem, West Bank Palestinians avoid Israeli buses as much as possible, and rely instead on Palestinian buses.

Although Palestinians do not ride as passengers on Israeli buses, Israeli Palestinians comprise a sizable minority of the cohort of Egged bus drivers. Even more than physical appearance, the distance between Palestinian and Israeli Jewish was evident in their response to my questions. Whereas Israeli drivers feigned ignorance when I asked how to get to “Bethlehem,” Palestinian drivers were happy to guide me towards that West Bank city from Jerusalem. Ask one of the Israeli Egged drivers how to get to Bethlehem from Jerusalem, and he will look at you as if you were asking to go to Tokyo. The most common reaction among such drivers was to pretend that they had never heard of the West Bank.

No law requires Israelis to avoid Palestinian buses or Palestinians to avoid Israeli buses. In contrast to the segregated trolleys of the American South, Palestinians are not legally required to sit at the back of the bus. The segregation that confronts any causal visitor to Jerusalem is partly elective.

As one Palestinian-American declares by way of emphasizing the complex political choices required by her daily commute, “I ride the bus that is strictly for Palestinians who do not have Israeli citizenship.” Although in theory this Palestinian woman could board an Egged bus, she avoids them out of solidarity with her fellow Palestinians. In the absence of a legal prohibition, but amid overwhelming unofficial discrimination, the norms of traveling apartheid further entrench the racialized binaries of everyday existence in Palestine/Israel.

Outside Jerusalem, past the many checkpoints bisecting the West Bank, the apartheid regime is significantly harsher. West Bank Palestinians who are only permitted to enter Israel for the purpose of work are required to restrict their movements to the “Palestinian only” bus lines that were introduced in March 2013 by the Israeli company Afikim in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Transportation. The Ministry of Transportation introduced this new legal requirement in response to settler demands for a bus system that could be used exclusively by them.

Whereas the white and blue buses that circumambulate east Jerusalem are Palestinian-run, the two new bus lines that transport Palestinian workers from the checkpoints into Israeli cities are run by Israelis. They correspond in this respect more closely to the classic apartheid model, whereby segregation is instituted and enforced by the ruling regime.

There are differences between the Israeli Jim Crow and its counterparts elsewhere in the world. The buses run by Afikim for transporting workers back to their homes in the West Bank are cheaper to ride than were their Palestinian predecessors. The introduction of this legally mandated form of segregation by the Ministry of Transportation therefore entails a decrease in the commuting cost for Palestinian workers, which is not a minor consideration given the West Bank’s (artificially) stalled economy and the scarcity of jobs. Even though the lines are often long for the Afikim buses, still such waiting has advantages over the former system, which required Palestinian workers to face taunts and racial slurs from the settlers with whom they were compelled to share space on their journey home.

The segregated bus system is enshrined within the high-tech infrastructure that generally characterizes the occupation. Its conciliatory rhetoric positions the Israeli state as a defender and protector of Palestinians’ interests. As the leading liberal Israeli daily Haaretz states of the light rail, another controversial addition to Israel’s transportation infrastructure originally run by the French multinational company Veolia, which until 2015 was also involved in Jerusalem’s segregated bus system, “Jerusalem’s light rail has become the most salient symbol of the city’s unification under the wings of normalization and technology,” writes Nir Hasson.

As with the light rail, which makes Israeli settlements permanent by linking them to Jerusalem, the checkpoints, and the wall, so with the bus system: the occupation is normalized through technical means. While some Israelis regard the light rail as a symbol of Jerusalem’s unification, others point to its institutionalization of new forms of discrimination. Hanna Baumann makes a compelling case for the light rail as an agent in segregation. She argues that this new mode of Jim Crow transportation was the reason why light rail stations were destroyed by rioting Palestinians in early July 2014, following the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Israeli settlers. East Jerusalem Palestinians, argues Baumann, “are not in fact quietly acquiescing to the ‘unification’ of the city, which they understand as the annexation of occupied land.”

Even following the introduction of the new bus lines, Israeli laws have not changed to reflect the reality of the new segregation. Transportation Minister Israel Katz insists that Palestinians are free to travel on any bus line as long as they have a permit. “Palestinians entering Israel will be able to ride on all public transportation lines,” he claimed in 2013. While the reality on the ground gives the lie to his statement, it is true that Palestinians are not legally barred from boarding buses not intended for their use. However, de facto segregation is protected and there is no reliable legal mechanism to challenge it.

Instead of imprisoning Palestinians who violate the segregation regime, segregation is instituted through subtler means. Palestinians are pressured and incentivized to avoid buses designated for settlers. Inevitably, they prioritize the welfare of themselves and their family over distant goals of equality for the Palestinian people.

When asked for his reaction to the new bus system, one Palestinian worker clarified his reasons for preferring de facto segregation. Noting that settlers regularly spat in his face when he travelled alongside them on his way home from work, he stated that he preferred the new system. The settlers “can say what they want,” this worker explained, “as long as I’m safe on the bus. I just want to put bread on the table for my children.”

Although the law is vague when it comes to the Palestinian right to ride Israeli buses, some Palestinians have exposed the discriminatory dimensions of this new system by refusing to abide by the new regulations. These activists’ non-violent actions, inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, resulted in mass arrests. Such suppression demonstrates that, even though Palestinians are not legally required to ride the buses designated for them, those who refuse to do so will be arrested and prosecuted on other legal grounds. Retribution for civil disobedience regarding Jim Crow regulations sends a clear warning signal to would-be Palestinian activists, and limits their ability to agitate for equality and social justice.

Amid the brutalization of Gaza, where bombs are rained down on hospitals, and access to electricity and water has been cut by the Israeli state, Israel’s Jim Crow bus system seems like a minor detail in its occupation. Even through the harm caused by traveling apartheid cannot compare to the carpet bombing of Gaza, the two-tiered bus system illustrates how the occupation affects all Israelis and Palestinians, including those who reside in Jerusalem or in parts of Israel not formally under occupation.

Both de facto and de jure segregation damage any prospects of future peace. If Israelis and Palestinians travelled in the same buses every day as they navigated the Occupied Territories, then the geography of occupation would stand a greater chance of bursting the bubble of Israel’s apartheid imagination.

With a non-segregated bus system, the separation wall, which Israel insists is the only certain way of bringing Palestinian violence to an end, would lose its alibi. The advantages of abolishing traveling apartheid are practical as well as ethical. Even terrorists who believe that the cause of Palestinian liberation is advanced by killing Israeli civilians would be hard pressed to justify Palestinian casualties under conditions of equality. If Palestinians and Israelis travelled together on the same buses everyday, then this co-existence would prevail over the ideology of apartheid. Those who profit from the antagonisms generated by this conflict would find it increasingly difficult to define the Other as their enemy. Such peace poses a greater threat to the current Israeli regime, which thrives on fear, than do the most blatant acts of terrorism.

Solidarity against travelling apartheid would also constitute a united front against ethnocratic Israel. If Israeli and Palestinian passengers rode the same buses together, rather than being siphoned into buses according to their ethnicity, if the buses that now run parallel to each other on the same roads were merged into a single transportation network, then the battle lines of the occupation would have to be redrawn.

The violent transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has exposed the pretense of the so-called two-state solution. Most credible commentators on Palestine recognize that there is only a one-state reality, and no other viable alternative. The Jim Crow bus system is a physical symptom of the apartheid that a two-state solution would consolidate if erected along actually-existing borders. Now that the pretense of the two-state ideal has been exposed, the Jim Crow bus system makes even more visible the need for a single state wherein Israelis and Palestinians live together with equal rights, under the same rule of law.

For nearly a century, from 1876 to 1965, Jim Crow was the status quo, legally mandated in the southern United States and tacitly followed in the northern states. Israel, founded in 1948, is still younger than the entire length of the Jim Crow era. The full panoply of discriminatory regulations that segregate Palestinians from Israelis today are of even more recent vintage. While Israeli apartheid is still evolving, the unfolding of this process before our very eyes, at this very minute, as we write, speak, and fail to act, intensifies the urgency of protesting against it.

While acknowledging the relevance of the apartheid analogy, Palestinian philosopher Raef Zreik argues that

the defining feature of the Palestinian case, in contrast to that of the South African blacks, is fragmentation; the Palestinian experience has so many different facets that it is impossible to subsume them all under a single term like Apartheid.

Zreik acutely diagnoses the limitations of rights discourse for theorizing about, and acting within, Palestine/Israel, in the absence of a framework shared by both sides. Such a framework is the key element missing from the situation of Palestine/Israel, and what was present in the case of South African apartheid. In the US context too, as Zreik notes,

one might have conceived of blacks … as having been excluded, because there was a totality (the American people) of which they were presumably a part, but from which they were in fact excluded.

In an atmosphere of entrenched inequality, there is no alternative framework to which the apartheid geography of the Israeli occupation can be opposed. And yet such a framework is necessary, if only as a conceptual possibility, to index the distance between Israel’s apartheid project and international legal and ethical norms. What does not yet exist must be invented, no matter how much imagination and courage is needed. We need a vision of what our coexistence should look like, no matter how impossible it seems.

While every historical comparison risks obscuring key differences, Palestinian and Israeli civil rights advocates can learn from the strategies South Africans and African-Americans have developed for resisting travelling apartheid, for pinning it down and dismantling it. Will these lessons in anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance from other times guide the creation of a post-apartheid state of “Palestine/Israel”? That will be determined in part by those who ride the bus, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and elsewhere throughout Occupied Palestine, every day.

Further Reading

Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Apartheid Israel: the politics of an analogy, edited by Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).

Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Robert Wintemute, “Israel-Palestine Through the Lens of Racial Discrimination Law: Is the South African Apartheid Analogy Accurate, and What if the European Convention Applied?” King’s Law Journal 28.1 (2017): 89–129.

I have gathered my writings on Palestine in this list:

One relevant article is “From the River to the Sea: A historical enquiry”:

Also see my book on resisting the crackdown on Palestine solidarity:

My YouTube channel, Poetry and Protest, is rich in Palestine-related content, including a series on the children of Gaza: