American think-tank looks ahead to Palestine, 2015

[emad]

This is a vision of the future Arab state as set out by a $2m study by one of America's most prestigious think-tanks. What's more, the Palestinians love it, reports Donald Macintyre
24 May 2005


It's a futuristic concept as stunning as it is implausible, under present conditions. A Palestinian businessman on the way to a meeting in Cairo steps on to a train at a clean, modern rail station in the northern West Bank city of Jenin - no longer ravaged by bloody conflict but peacefully booming with private-sector office and apartment construction.

The businessman is whisked by fast train to the busy Gaza airport, the latest Middle Eastern hub, in less than 90 minutes. On the way, he savours the changing landscape through the train window - the mountains of Jordan to his left, the Israeli Highway Six and the Mediterranean to his right. He notes with satisfaction the aqueduct which follows the path of the railway line and whose construction solved at a stroke the desperate water shortages that had been faced by his people. He watches the Western backpackers hiking through an olive grove on one of the new national park trails that wind through the West Bank farmland and forest in sight of the track.

Glancing at his watch he chuckles at the 10 minutes it takes to get from Nablus to Ramallah - a journey, he remembers, that in 2005 could have taken, thanks to Israeli checkpoints and road closures, half a day, supposing he had the papers to allow him to make it at all.

On his return journey he will stop off at east Jerusalem, now universally acknowledged as the Palestinian state capital, for one of his frequent visits to his ageing mother - a simple trip that was virtually impossible a decade earlier, made all the easier by the California-style urban rapid bus system that runs from every station on the line. As the train pulls into Hebron, the last stop before it reaches southern Gaza, he casts an expert eye - he runs a building firm himself - at the imaginatively planned new neighbourhoods, each with their own recreation spaces, many housing refugees who have returned from Jordan or Syria, clustered along the tree-lined boulevards which link the station with the city's ancient centre. With all this building, he thinks, no wonder it is difficult to hire skilled construction workers in a labour market that saw Palestinian unemployment soaring over the 60 per cent mark back in 2005.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=640937

[SteppingRazor]

1. Pardon me while I roll my eyes...

This is Palestine in 10 years? Not bloody likely. First, as the article says, the designer of this vision has no experience in the Middle East. Also, as stated in the article, his vision would cost $33 billion. Where's that money coming from?
What a pipe dream. A real pretty pipe dream, but a pipe dream nonetheless.
More realistically, in 10 years the same peoples will be killing each other for the same damn reasons.