In a sense, the timing couldn’t be worse.
The violence that began with a botched intelligence operation and gunfight in Khan Younis and wound up with hundreds of rockets raining down on Israeli cities led on Wednesday to the resignation of Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose aides had indicated their willingness to let the Gaza projects proceed. And early elections in Israel, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of Gaza is expected to be a central issue, would put any progress on hold.
Still, the diplomats, academics and eco-entrepreneurs who met this week at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based at the tiny kibbutz Ketura in the Negev desert, said they wanted their projects to be shovel-ready whenever the time is ripe.
To be sure, proposals for Gaza infrastructure projects are commonplace: In February, Israel called on international donors to fund a billion-dollar rebuilding plan, including big-ticket items like two desalination plants, a natural gas pipeline and a new electrical transmission line into Gaza from Israel.
But major projects can take years to complete, leaving Gaza’s ills to fester.
Moreover, Israel and international donors, loath to do business with Hamas, have insisted that the more moderate Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, oversee any projects. But between the Palestinian Authority’s feud with Hamas, and the Trump administration’s feud with the authority, the result has been a Catch-22. And nothing is getting done.
What sets the Arava group’s projects apart, officials say, is that they could get underway immediately, with projects up and running in a few months and with most financed in large part by private investment.
Another risk of ambitious infrastructure projects is that, once completed, they become tempting targets for Israeli airstrikes in wartime. So the Arava group’s strategy is to stay small and spread out.
Source : Nytimes
