Anyone wishing to read the omens for John Kerry’s latest bid at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking need look no further than last month’s Israeli government announcement to proceed with the construction of a rail network linking Israel to the West Bank and Gaza.
Ignore the diplomatic statements issuing from Ramallah and Jerusalem, this rail project visibly demonstrates how Israel sees the future of the West Bank. It is not as an independent sovereign Palestine.
At 473km long and encompassing 11 lines and some 30 stations this new plan will complete the work of colonising Palestine, integrating its geography and economy into Israel. West Bank cities as far apart as Hebron, Jericho and Tulkarem, along with the illegal settlements of Ariel, Kiryat Arba and Ma’ale Adumim will all be connected to Israel proper, finally erasing the already punctured and porous Green Line.
Of course, as Rachel Neeman points out in Haaretz the plan could conceivably point the way to the realisation of a binational state, or alternatively could be a decoy to keep Naftali Bennet and the settlers on board whilst Netanyahu pursues a peace strategy. Unfortunately both interpretations are likely to be much too optimistic.
From 1967 until the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, Israel pursued a policy of integrating the Palestinian population into its economy. Under Oslo it abandoned this policy and decided instead on closure and then disengagement, a policy that reached its peak under Sharon and Olmert. Now this rail plan suggests a further reconfiguration of Israel’s strategy regarding keeping the West Bank territory and managing its population.
Netanyahu, despite his famous Bar-Ilan speech of June 2009 when he supposedly embraced the concept of two states for two peoples, has never favoured that outcome. The West Bank, or Judea and Samaria as he prefers to call it, remains “the land of our forefathers,” and any idea that he would willingly cede the ninety percent plus necessary for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state is fanciful to all except it seems Saeb Erekat and John Kerry.
This rail plan then should rather be understood in terms of Netanyahu’s “economic peace”. Speaking in 2008 he dismissed peace talks as “based only on one thing, only on peace talks,” and declared, “It makes no sense at this point to talk about the most contractible issue… That has led to failure and is likely to lead to failure again.” Instead he recommended “weaving an economic peace alongside a political process. That means that we have to strengthen the moderate parts of the Palestinian economy by handing rapid growth in those areas, rapid economic growth that gives a stake for peace for the ordinary Palestinians.”
This rail plan should be understood in these terms. While the tracks will undoubtedly increase the potential for Israeli economic exploitation of the underemployed Palestinian population – unemployment in the West Bank stands at 20.3 per cent – and so may lead to some measure of improved personal living standards, they will also erase the Palestinian potential for independent economic development and permanently embed the occupation both politically and economically.
Indeed, this rail plan reveals that Israel is not concerned with ending the occupation but merely reconfiguring it. Under it Israel will keep the territory and resources of the West Bank, harness its population for labour, yet leave their management to the Palestinian Authority. In short, it marks an end to the Oslo concept of land for peace and a return to the first decades of the occupation with the exception that it now embraces Moshe Dayan’s injunction: “Don’t rule them, let them lead their own lives.”
The Palestinian Authority understands this and so has refused to co-operate with the plan, however, through re-engaging in the negotiation process and thereby adding “the political process” dimension Netanyahu envisioned as a twin prop to his economic peace, it is in fact becoming complict with this final colonisation plan. The man who announced the plan, Irsaeli Transport Minister Yisrael Katz recently said, “a Palestinian state is unacceptable, mainly because of our right to this land.” It is time the Palestinian Authority and the international community acknowledged this is Israel’s reality and so ceased being accomplices to its realisation.
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