ARC OF THE COVENANT:

The Day After Peace: Designing Palestine (JAMES BENNET, 5/15/05, NY Times)

HIS sense for Palestinians' nostalgia, for their attachment to the land, even for what their cities actually looked like - that would all come much later. On a Saturday in January last year, in his design studio in Santa Monica, Calif., all Doug Suisman had to go on were some maps and aerial photographs, an adrenaline spike supplied by a deadline, and the grandeur of his commission: design the state of Palestine.

Even by the standards of these vivid, unpredictable days in the Middle East, the proposition seems hubristic: As part of a two-year, $2 million inquiry to determine whether Palestine could succeed, the Rand Corporation turned to Mr. Suisman, a hip if civic-minded architect with sparse background in the region, to envision the state. He had been to Israel once, in 1972, and he had never visited the major Palestinian cities.

Rand had judged that for all the attention lavished on the possible borders between Israel and a notional Palestine, no one had expended much imagination on the structure of the latter. Palestine had persisted as a dream or nightmare, as an abstraction to occupy diplomats and politicians, not as a concrete challenge for urban planners. Yet both the American president and the Israeli prime minister had now called for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. If the world was serious about a two-state solution, Rand reasoned, someone had to start planning Palestine, particularly since its population was about to surge. The alternative - a failed, impoverished and angry ward on Israel's doorstep, if not in its living room - posed a problem, a danger, for the world.

Rand, an independent nonprofit think tank with a reputation for dispassion and a record of advancing the space program and the military, has concluded that the challenge can be met. It has delivered up a gimlet-eyed survey of life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that shows how far Palestinians are from viable statehood: the crippled, dependent economy, the "corrupt, nonrepresentative and authoritarian rule," the inadequate water supply, the pressure of Israeli occupation. It has suggested a long list of improvements, which it says would cost $33 billion over 10 years. And it has twinned its appraisal with a second study, a vision of what might be, the vision that Mr. Suisman eventually dreamed up that Saturday in his studio. [...]

At its most prosaic, the proposal calls for a mere connecting of the dots, for a high-speed train and fiber-optic network curving through the West Bank and Gaza to link the main Palestinian cities and towns. Yet it amounts to a reimagining not only of the landscape, fractured as it is by checkpoints and army positions after years of conflict, but also of the Palestinian experience. In place of Palestinian political and social fragmentation, Mr. Suisman proposes the most modern and swift of connections. In place of the Palestinian condition of near paralysis, he posits a state of motion. He calls it "the Arc." It is a glimpse, seen so rarely these days, of a reconciling land, post-conflict, post-occupation, post-terrorism.

When Mr. Suisman finished a recent presentation to Palestinians in a darkened meeting room in Ramallah, on the West Bank, Jihad al Wazir, the deputy finance minister, broke the silence by saying he had tears in his eyes.

"I was very moved," Mr. al Wazir said later. "It had that beauty of simplicity of design, and coherence, and comprehensiveness." Some of the Palestinians' own planners, he said, "were lost in the details, without a unifying framework or a vision for a future of the Palestinian state."

When he was initially considering the maps, Mr. Suisman did not dwell on past or present details. He thought about what was coming, in particular the projection by Rand's analysts that the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza would almost double in the next 15 years, to 6.6 million, from 3.6 million.

It's a place where folks tend to get lost in the details and ignore the imminent future, eh?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2005 10:21 AM