In the Nablus shopping district, a woman with bags and a balloon waited for transportation. The removal of an Israeli checkpoint has made access to the city easier.-- NY Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently went public with an Israeli plan for ‘economic peace’ with the Palestinian people. This concept is distinct from political peace, which addresses the stated demands of the Palestinian authority, in that it ‘circumvents’ this neutered government to give Palestinians what the Israeli government knows they want deep down: economic growth. Netanyahu: “[Economic peace]…means that we have to strengthen the moderate parts of the Palestinian economy by handing rapid growth in those area, rapid economic growth that gives a stake for peace for the ordinary Palestinians.”

The next section is under the heading “Development mitigates” and explains Tony Blaire’s perspective that problems must be mitigated before they are solved. I get the feeling that there is a very specific set of characteristics that go into the “ordinary Palestinian” category. Palestinians who are reasonable, humble, profoundly apolitical and even anti-political, who are concerned only with protecting and feeding their family and/or business. It’s this Palestinian which is the human material the authorities hope to use to remake the region.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article that seems to act as an ode to this hypothetical Palestinian’s hopes and dreams. Some quotes that smell of cheap perfume:

“The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009.”

“Two years ago I couldn’t have even gone to Nablus,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. “Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics.”

“The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion.”

“Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship.

There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference.

An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders.”

The last sentence is frightening. Loosening the human material from its backwardness and tradition in order to outsource pacification? An original yet unmistakable reiteration of the colonial dynamic. Tzipi Livni, an Israeli-Jewish Ashkenazi politician offered these sometimes confusing words of wisdom on the nature of the state of Israel:

Sporadic clashes were reported in the operations focussed on the Old City area of Nablus. February 25, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk

“A Jewish state is a matter of values. It is not a matter of religion, it is more a matter of nationality. And a Jewish state is not a monopoly of rabbis, it’s what each and everyone feels inside, it’s about the nature of the state of Israel,” she said.

“Its about the Jewish tradition, it’s about Jewish history. But we need to keep the nature, the character of the state of Israel as a Jewish state because this is – excuse me for using French – the raison d’etre of the state of Israel.”

Maybe the authors of the NY times article will explain these views as proof of the ‘ancestral grip’ that Livni’s village or family has on her. Perhaps they should send her train as a soldier in Jordan so that she can be loosened from them.

It seems that the powers that be are drilling Palestinians to replace the IDF in the population centers (not the majority of the West Bank), and that cooperation is rewarded with ‘economic growth.’ All the Palestinians interviewed were high-class managers and vice-presidents talking about the importance of the rule of law, but I’m not sure whether the Palestinian attacks or Israeli checkpoints were holding their back their purely economic agendas.

Law and order, security, and economics, totally apolitical things that can be endlessly and apolitically improved to mitigate, to contain, to clean up the wound so political surgery can finally be performed. But there are too many echoes from South Africa here; it seems that all these apolitical interventions comprise a very political aim, namely building the basis for a Palestinian ‘government,’ a group of heavily armed municipalities, who are recognized by the world as a somehow separate entity from the Israeli government, which actually calls the shots.

Economic growth is not a substitute for being recognized as human beings. One of us should look into ‘economic peace’ in South Africa, in the American south after slavery, and in other places.

Richard Silverstein talks about this NY Times article here.