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As with the commencement speech proclaiming there are no experts, just
us chickens, this concludes with the force
majeure of “I have a dream”.
And often, the successful peacemakers are the planners, architects and
engineers who can make it tangible progress happen, not the politicians or the
military generals. KwC American Think-tank Looks Ahead to Palestine,
2015 What's more, the Palestinians love it by
Donald Macintyre, Independent/UK and CommonDreams.org,
Tuesday, May 24, 2005 It's a futuristic
concept as stunning as it is implausible, under present conditions. A
Palestinian businessman on the way to a meeting in Cairo steps on to a train at
a clean, modern rail station in the northern West Bank city of Jenin - no
longer ravaged by bloody conflict but peacefully booming with private-sector
office and apartment construction. The businessman is
whisked by fast train to the busy Gaza airport, the latest Middle Eastern hub,
in less than 90 minutes. On the way, he savours the changing landscape through
the train window - the mountains of Jordan to his left, the Israeli Highway Six
and the Mediterranean to his right. He notes with satisfaction the aqueduct
which follows the path of the railway line and whose construction solved at a
stroke the desperate water shortages that had been faced by his people. He
watches the Western backpackers hiking through an olive grove on one of the new
national park trails that wind through the West Bank farmland and forest in
sight of the track. Glancing at his watch
he chuckles at the 10 minutes it takes to get from Nablus to Ramallah - a
journey, he remembers, that in 2005 could have taken, thanks to Israeli
checkpoints and road closures, half a day, supposing he had the papers to allow
him to make it at all. On his return journey
he will stop off at east Jerusalem, now universally acknowledged as the
Palestinian state capital, for one of his frequent visits to his ageing mother
- a simple trip that was virtually impossible a decade earlier, made all the
easier by the California-style urban rapid bus system that runs from every
station on the line. As the train pulls into Hebron, the last stop before it
reaches southern Gaza, he casts an expert eye - he runs a building firm himself
- at the imaginatively planned new neighborhoods, each with their own
recreation spaces, many housing refugees who have returned from Jordan or
Syria, clustered along the tree-lined boulevards which link the station with
the city's ancient center. With all this building, he thinks, no wonder it is
difficult to hire skilled construction workers in a labor market that saw Palestinian
unemployment soaring over the 60 per cent mark back in 2005. It's an idea about as
far away from present-day reality as it is possible to be. But it is no bedtime
story. For it is almost exactly the vision which informs a new $2m (�1.1m)
study produced by one of America's most prestigious think-tanks, the Rand Corporation. The two complementary reports are, in
Rand's own words, the "most comprehensive recommendations ever made for
the success of an independent Palestinian state". This week Mahmoud
Abbas flies into Washington for what will be George Bush's first meeting with a
Palestinian Authority president. He does so at a time when, for all the
dramatic, if far from entrenched, decline in violence since the Sharm el-Sheikh
summit in February, the possibility of a negotiated peace deal to end the
conflict and the occupation once and for all seem almost as far away as ever. Whether or not that
outlook can be improved by Thursday's talks, it is a safe bet that the
well-worn term of a "viable Palestinian state" will be repeated
incessantly as the formal goal of US foreign policy - and for that matter of
the Palestinians and the Israelis themselves. The Rand Corporation study cannot of
itself bring that still painfully distant-seeming goal any nearer. But it can
at least, and as never before, draw some of the contours of what such a state
might look like. At the core of the
Rand proposals is the
Arc, a 130-mile corridor running
south through the West Bank, looping into southern Gaza - where the disused
airport is - and then back up to Gaza City and the north of the Strip. It
would, however, include not only the fast rail link, but also a water conduit,
fibre-optic cable, power lines, and in recognition that not all freight and
passenger journeys will be made by rail, a toll road and a linear national
park. According to Rand its construction would provide between 100,000 and
160,000 desperately needed jobs over five years. Rand hired Doug
Suisman, an architect from California, with a strong interest in publicly useful projects but no experience in the Middle East, to
think from first principles about the future design of a Palestinian state that
would work. Part
of his brief came from the main donor for the Arc study, Guilford Glazier, an
84-year-old American property developer who had his own memories of the great
Tennessee Valley Authority project begun in 1933 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt -
a massive public project which delivered cheap hydro-electric power and
irrigation while creating desperately needed work in the process. Glazier wanted a
specific problem addressed - how could the West Bank accommodate the return of
perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees and their dependants who had fled or
been driven out of Israel in the 1948 war? One answer to that, in Suisman's
blueprint, was the new neighborhoods lining the boulevards which link the
stations to the heart of each West Bank city. Such housing would add more than
$2bn to the $6bn cost of the Arc itself. And that would be a fraction of the $33bn
total cost over 10 years of the wholesale regeneration envisaged by Rand in its
other report, Building
a Successful Palestinian State. Massive sums. Of
course, you might think that the lasting prospects for peace that would be
consolidated by a successful Palestinian state are pretty well without price.
But in any case, Rand
points out that the costs per head of population are only marginally more than
the international community allocated for the first two years of post-war
reconstruction in Bosnia.
Though tempered with
caution, the reaction of the Palestinian leadership to the Rand ideas has
ranged from positive to highly enthusiastic. At the weekend meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan -
"Davos in the desert" - Rand experts met senior PA officials to discuss how to
take the project forward and a meeting has already been scheduled in Ramallah
in the next fortnight, at which Palestinian ministers will suggest some of
their own modifications. Ghassan Khatib, the PA's planning minister, said he had
concerns that because the Arc had been routed along the main eastern cities of
the West Bank it largely left out what the Palestinian leadership regards as
the key potential development triangle formed by Nablus, and to the west,
Qalqilya and Tulkarem. He also said the plan had little to say about the
collateral development impact in Gaza, which because of its huge population
density - close to the highest in the world - would not, in the opinion of the
Rand planners, be capable of absorbing any more refugees after any final peace
deal. But Mr Khatib added: "We are looking at this from a perspective and
we hope it can be incorporated into our own national planning." He said
his ministry had some ideas to put to Rand which be believed did not "contradict
their basic ideas". The Rand studies have
also ridden over some thorny political questions. The refugee assumption is
clearly that returnees will come to the Palestinian state and not to their
original family homes in Israel - long the formal demand of the PLO. This is counterbalanced by an assumption -
fiercely contested by
the Israeli right - that a portioned Jerusalem will be part of the Palestinian
state, arguing, correctly, that "without a credible sovereign presence in
Jerusalem, the new state of Palestine will suffer a serious legitimacy deficit
among its people". Since some
disinterested observers believe that any future two-state deal would probably
trade the joint status of Jerusalem for abandonment of a right to return to Israel,
the Rand approach is unsurprising. But some Palestinian negotiating officials
were also worried that Rand was silent on the Jewish West Bank settlements. Mr
Khatib, however, said that he was assuming that since the Arc passed through
parts of the West Bank currently populated by Jewish settlers, the plan meant
that by the time it was enacted the territory would be "settlement
free". The whole point of the Rand study,
however, is to move beyond the detailed, albeit vital, questions about borders
to ones of how to sustain a Palestinian state. And in this it appears to have
been a real success. When
Mr Suisman completed his initial presentation of the study in Ramallah, there
was a long silence, broken by Jihad al-Wazir, the deputy planning minister, saying
that he had "tears in his eyes". He said this week: "I was very
moved. You know, you are dealing
all the time with the nitty gritty of the conflict and then someone comes from
LA who has a vision, who has thought out of the box." Mr Wazir said the plan
had a kind of "American
naivety" which he implied might be just what was needed in envisaging the
future Palestinian state. It would mean "improvements in social cohesion", opportunities for desperately
needed investment in the West Bank and Gaza, "and a rail link which can be
a symbol of national progress". Mr Wazir
added: "I hope that we will move this forward and that it will start to
become part of our planning perspective." Given the present
progress, or lack of it, in Israeli-Palestinian relations, the Rand Corporation
blueprint of what a future Palestine could look like, seems like a fantasy,
more Utopian than rooted in the grim political realities of a 37-year-old
occupation. And yet it may be none the worse for that. As the report itself concludes: "Our analyses are
motivated by a firm belief that thoughtful preparation can facilitate peace. Certainly, when peace comes, such
preparation will be essential to the success of the new state, as recent US
experience in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrates. "The vision
described in this book should help Palestinians, Israelis, and the
international community prepare for the moment when the parties are ready to
create and sustain a successful Palestinian state." It may be no more than
a dream but true progress rarely comes without starting in a dream. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0524-02.htm |
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