Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged recently 800 million shekels ($226 million) for security measures along West Bank roads used only by settlers, bypassing Arab villages. Pocketing that significant pledge in public funds, head of the Samaria Regional Council Yossi Dagan declared, “It’s not a question of who won — this is a victory for us all.” Dagan, one of the Likud Party’s biggest membership drivers, named the partners in this victory: the settlement movement, the Israeli government, the national camp and “the entire State of Israel.” Did anyone ask the State of Israel whether it thinks spending almost 1 billion shekels on roads for West Bank settlers outside its sovereign territory is worth it?

This major expense may well reduce the number of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism on the roads leading to and from the settlements. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:5) says, “Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” However, nowhere does it say that the lives of those who decided to risk life and limb in order to settle in occupied territories are worth any more than the lives of those who built their homes in the Negev or Galilee regions of sovereign Israel. Let’s look at the data: In 2016, 17 Israelis were killed in 142 significant terror attacks (compared with 171 the previous year). An average of 40 Israelis are killed every year in hundreds of traffic accidents on the seven "red roads," most of them in far-flung areas of the country, neglected due to budgetary constraints.

As noted in Al-Monitor Oct. 31, Israel has the highest motor vehicle road density among the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a sure-fire recipe for traffic fatalities. The decision to allocate 800 million shekels to upgrade roads in the territories cannot be attributed to any data compiled by the Central Bureau of Statistics. It stems from the preponderance of settlers among members of Israel’s right-wing parties, as reflected in the pilgrimage by 13 Cabinet ministers and a long list of Knesset members to the settlers’ protest tent outside the prime minister’s residence to demand the road upgrades. Yes, a protest against that same prime minister who, according to those same politicians, is being undermined by anti-corruption protesters, the courts, left-wing organizations, the state prosecution, the police, or all of the above.

In December 2014, Netanyahu set the stage for early elections (held eventually in March 2015), citing the support of his coalition partner, the centrist Yesh Atid party, for proposed legislation curtailing the Israel Hayom newspaper owned by his backer Sheldon Adelson. The prime minister declared at the time, “I will not agree to having … ministers in the government attacking the government.”