Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, page 24

Affairs of State

Cloverleaf Diplomacy at Wye Plantation Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers a Bundle for Apartheid Roads

By Eugene Bird

Israel plans to use a substantial part of the new $1.2 billion slush fund it will collect in addition to its normal U.S. foreign aid as a reward for signing the Wye agreement to build West Bank roads for Israelis only.

The Palestine Authority also is asking that some of the additional $400 million it is to receive over five years for implementing the Wye agreement be allocated to building roads between villages and towns liberated or partially liberated from Israeli occupation.

That means there will be a road-building frenzy with both sides using American tax dollars to duplicate roads that will crisscross the landscape, destroying a lot of Palestinian homes and scarce agricultural land in the process. That should bring about almost total apartheid, if not peace.

Still to be negotiated with Congress, the special Israeli grant will be a reward for behaving so nicely at Wye River, even though the Israeli prime minister managed to violate all the rules of that conference by sending over his most intransigent supporters to spin the press on an almost daily basis, and threatening to depart at one point, claiming that the Palestinians were not serious enough.

Israel will receive its billion U.S. dollars up front, while the Palestinians will receive their projected $80 million or thereabouts per year with many requirements placed on them. Fortunately for the Palestinians, non-American donors are expected to give the Palestinians a total of over $2.1 billion over the next five years, presumably without so many crippling U.S.-style restrictions.

Cloverleaf Diplomacy

Listening to a State Department briefing concerning the new American-sponsored five-year aid program reminded me of a 1955 Department of State study of a proposal to build crisscrossing superhighways connecting the Arab populations of Sinai and Jordan and the Israeli towns of Beersheba and Eilat.

The idea then was that the Egypt-Jordan road connection would answer the charge by then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt that Israel was a “dagger” severing the Arab world. Israelis could drive under an overpass connecting the two Arab states. It was known then as “the cloverleaf approach” to solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Here We Go Again

The Israeli attack on Suez in 1956 ended that idea, but here it is again. The U.S. will fund at great expense the building of duplicate roads—a sort of international fleecing of America.

Israelis would travel to and from their illegal, in our own words, West Bank settlements deep in Palestinian territory on U.S.-financed highways, and Palestinians would travel between their own towns and villages on American-financed roads that would pass over, under or around the other American built roads.

Foolish? That’s an understatement. If the Israelis literally cannot share roads with the Palestinians, can they ever reach peace?

The U.S. already has spent a couple of million dollars building a very short street in Hebron to carry out the apartheid policy initiated by the Netanyahu government there. The extremely provocative Jewish settlers in Hebron, all 200 or 400 of them depending on whom you believe, now have their own broad street to travel to and from their houses while the 100,000 Palestinian residents use a parallel street also built with American money.

Roads Equal Jobs?

U.S. officials claim that during the first five years of the Oslo accords it has been necessary to spend much of the U.S. foreign aid to the Palestinians on budgetary support, but that that will change now. The larger number of Palestinians being allowed to work inside Israel means larger tax income for the Palestinian Authority.

Assuming that Israeli border closures become less frequent, the U.S. intends for more of its aid to the Palestinian Authority to go for social support purposes such as the hospitals, schools and clinics once supported by Hamas. But the Palestinians recognize that they must compete to hold West Bank land by building their own roads and creating their own links to the villages remaining in their hands. They intend to carry out a public works program to do just that.

Roads to Nowhere

In the 1930s Populist Governor Huey (Kingfish) Long of Louisiana faced down his state legislature, which refused to appropriate more than one-third of the money he had demanded to build roads. He went ahead and built one mile, then skipped two miles, then built another mile all the way across the state. He got his money.

The real question for the Palestinians will be how to build roads that link the West Bank cities, towns and villages under their control without crossing territory still under Israeli control.

The Israelis don’t have that problem. They’ve retained lots of contiguous territory. But since only the Israelis decided what territories to cede and what to retain under the Wye agreement, so far Israeli withdrawals have not done much to improve access by the Palestinians to each other and to the outside world.

Five or ten years from now, regardless of what happens in the peace process, such a maze of roads undoubtedly will look so absurd that some future conference will be convened to decide how to abandon them, integrate the road users, restore the land to productivity, and get the U.S. taxpayer to pay the bill again. Surely we could have done better things with our money.