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Separate But Unequal
Hanan Sher
Is it possible to cut the links between the Israeli and Palestinian economies, forged over three decades?
After a month's absence Ahmed, who for 15 years has done odd jobs and gardening for residents of a middle-class North Jerusalem neighborhood, shows up one late-October morning looking for work. He shows one of his regular customers a permit, ostensibly allowing him to cross into Israel from his West Bank home despite the closure. He says it�s taken him four hours, and arguments with soldiers at roadblocks on both sides of Bethlehem, to get there from his village southwest of Hebron. �They�ve asked my sons to join the stone-throwing, but I won�t let them,� he tells a regular client. �I don�t want more violence. Without quiet, there won�t be work.�
Ahmed might find it much more difficult to get to work some day soon, if Israel goes ahead with the plan for a physical �separation� from the Palestinian entity, whether it remains an autonomous authority or declares itself an independent state. There are no final decisions yet, but the plan, currently being put together by teams at the Defense and Finance ministries, certainly would restrict the movement of Palestinians like Ahmed, and allow in far fewer than the 100,000 to 120,000 who worked in Israel legally and illegally before the current vio-lence. Apparently it involves a physical barrier, an earthen wall or fence, with half a dozen crossings � in order to restrict the possibility of contact between the two sides.
The Prime Minister�s Office says that under virtually no circumstances would Israel cut off supplies of water or electricity, which it controls, to the Palestinians, or deny them food or medical supplies. Rather, the idea is to create �a border that breathes� � which would include some strictly controlled movement of workers and of goods, and the gradual separation of the common infrastructure deliberately created since Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The late Moshe Dayan, as defense minister, advocated binding Israel and the territories into one economic unit. Dayan won out over the objection of the late Pinhas Sapir, the dovish finance minister, who looked toward an eventual return of the territories to Arab sovereignty. Now, posthumously, Sapir may be about to prevail.
The breathing border isn�t nearly enough for Dan Schueftan, who outlines an Israeli-Palestinian divorce in his �In the Spirit of Separation� (Hebrew, Zmoira Bitan), published this year. The Haifa University Mideast expert, who�s been a hot commodity with the press lately, isn�t interested in half-way measures: He wants to separate as much as possible, as soon as possible. He�d build a bridge connecting the West Bank and Gaza (the �safe passage� of the Oslo Agreements) that would be �closed all over, so they couldn�t look down or stop to throw stones or bombs.� And he�d even give up on the 500 million cubic meters of water that flow under the West Bank. �Let them keep it all,� he roars. �We can desalinate the water we need.�
Israel doesn�t need cheap Palestinian labor or the Palestinian market either, he argues pugnaciously: �We need to export to the Silicon Valley, not the Nile Valley.� And, he posits, separation would be an economic benefit, �we�d save the entire cost immediately, by eliminating Palestinian crime.�
Such an abrupt and total cut-off, argues Samir Abdallah, head of the PA�s official trade authority, �is like declaring economic warfare unless Israel gives us full economic independence, control over international passage and trade, and of our infrastructure. But that means resolution of the political issues.�
Israel, Abdallah says, cannot absolve itself of responsibility. �Israel created our labor surplus� in 30 years of occupation, by refusing to allow foreign investment in the West Bank and Gaza, and �put a squeeze on our infrastructure.� It was all, he charges, part of a policy �of getting people to leave, and in the 1970s they left for the Gulf. But that�s no longer possible, and there�s no place for them now outside Israel�s economy. Israel is not talking about separation, but a state of siege.�
Abdallah�s view � which toes the official Palestinian line � gets sympathetic nods from many Israelis. �It simply can�t work,� says Gershon Baskin of IPCRI, an Israeli-Palestinian NGO that suspended operations after the October 12 lynch of two reservists in Ramallah, when Baskin temporarily stopped going to his Bethlehem office.
Ephraim Sneh, the deputy defense minister, puts a different spin on the idea. �We�re not,� he told an interviewer in late October, going to turn the West Bank and Gaza into two giant refugee camps, surrounded by barbed wire, with people going hungry inside.� Still, none of the separation ideas currently being fleshed out would involve anything less than full Israeli control over the international land entry points to Jordan and Egypt, and complete control of air and sea access, which is deemed necessary for security.
One way of replacing the jobs in construction and agriculture that Palestinians would lose in Israel (which, Finance Ministry Director General Avi Ben-Bassat emphasizes, would not be filled by more imported foreign workers, but by unemployed Israelis at attractive wages) would be through the creation of zones from which goods, but not Palestinian workers, move into Israel. In fact, the industrial zone at the northern end of the Gaza Strip has continued to operate � and export to Israel � through much of the current violence.
Other free-trade zones have been mooted in the West Bank. At Kerem Shalom near the southern end of the Gaza Strip, industrialist Stef Wertheimer of Iscar Blades is planning for parallel Israeli and Palestinian-owned high-tech parks, on both sides of the frontier. The two parks could be up and running within a year, says Wertheimer, who thinks it�s still possible to move ahead, despite the current conflict. �We�ve finished all the plans except for one detail, about the joint coffee shop, that will link the two parks. What we haven�t decided is what kind of coffee to serve there.�
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