Not content to merely write a love-letter to terrorists or advocate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State in his “news” articles, AsAJew Ben Ehrenreich recently wrote a “Cliff’s Notes” to the Arab-Israel conflict that, unsurprisingly is wrong on almost every level. Rather than let him get away with yet more lies that place all the blame on Israel, I decided to examine his “10 Points” and took them apart one by one.
For previous installments, see here.
7 Permits and checkpoints
This is one of my “favorite” lines:
“In the early 1990s, Israel began requiring Palestinians to obtain permits before entering Israel or moving between the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.”
No context is given; Israel just decided one day to start requiring entry permits from Palestinians. Why bother saying this happened after the First Intifada when Palestinians started entering Israel to murder Jews en masse? Why bother mentioning that it makes perfect logical and legal sense that after creating an autonomous Palestinian territory, people wanting to cross an international border would need to get permission to do so? Why bother pointing out that the fact that Israel only began requiring entry permits in the early 1990s means that for well over 20 years, Palestinians faced no barriers, checkpoints or entry requirements in order to travel between the territories and Israel?
Ehrenreich admits most checkpoints were set up during the Second Intifada, but condemns it for setting them up where they would actually be effective at stopping terrorism before it reaches Israel, namely in Judea and Samaria. He then lies that “more than half of the nearly 100 permanent checkpoints in the West Bank regulate travel within Palestinian territory.” In fact, according to B’tselem there are only 69 permanent checkpoints, of which 56 are border crossings (39 into Israel, 17 between H1 and H2 in Hebron). That leaves 13 permanent checkpoints within Judea and Samaria, nowhere close to the nearly 50 Ehrenreich claims. What’s more, before February 2014 there were 40 permanent checkpoints established by Israel, but as the level of terrorism decreased, Israel dismantled 27 checkpoints! The message is very clear, if Ehrenreich really wants to see the checkpoints disappear, all he has to do is get the Palestinians to stop engaging in terrorism.
In the same way the pogroms are not outbreaks of violence, checkpoints are not “sites of clashes, and of Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli security forces.” If Palestinians stopped attacking the checkpoints, they would stop getting arrested or killed for doing so. Better yet, if Palestinians stopped attacking Jews altogether, the checkpoints would disappear completely.
