Sidestepping Dependency

Shlomo Avineri

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1994

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Summary:  Close economic cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians will only nurture Palestinian dependency and perpetuate frictions.

Shlomo Avineri is Herbert Samuel Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is former Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In the complex transfer of power between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the world’s focus has been on the difficult, often violent issues of security that surround the creation of limited Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and Jericho. In this atmosphere, the economic agreement signed by the two parties in Paris on April 29, 1994, was hardly noticed. Amid the humdrum details, however, a conventional wisdom came to be shared by participants and observers alike, that a high degree of economic cooperation between Israel and the evolving Palestinian entity was a panacea for the region’s problems. Close cooperation between Israel and the nascent Palestinian economy has been universally heralded as a harbinger of a wider regional structure of economic cooperation, if not integration. The European Community is the model.

Like all conventional wisdom, however, this hypothesis should be tested, and the analogy with the European Community should be looked at more carefully. Even a superficial glance at the main ingredients of such a vision raises doubts about its applicability.

A COMMON MARKET

A Middle Eastern common market was a concept often used by the discussants during the Paris talks. It was premised on what appeared to be the obvious: shared economic interests, a high degree of cooperation and mutual interdependence, and a desire to raise living standards, especially among the Palestinians, all of which were viewed, almost without demurral, as the best guarantees of stability and peace in the area. Did not the French and Germans bury the hatchet, overcome generations of strife and build, on a foundation of coal and steel, a durable peace in Europe? If so, why not Jews and Arabs?

In its most poetic, if not utopian, version, this vision of a future Golden Age, based on Arab and Jewish ingenuity, has been voiced by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Urbane, tolerant, forward-looking, steeped in the best traditions of the Enlightenment, Peres is one of the more attractive symbols of the new spirit of conciliation and the most successful salesman of the Oslo accords in Israel and abroad. Since Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat signed the limited autonomy agreement in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993, dozens of conferences on economic cooperation have been held, some academically serious, others more oriented toward commercial hype. All, however, assume that close Israeli-Palestinian economic cooperation is the key to regional stability and to anchoring the Israeli-PLO accord in the realities of what the Marxists once called "economic infrastructures."

AN UNEQUAL PARTNERSHIP

European economic integration started with economies that were at a comparable stage of industrial and technological development and enjoyed similar political institutions and traditions. Their economic histories had followed similar lines since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution two centuries before. Only after the formation of this nucleus could the European Community broaden to include less-developed countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece, and this expansion was possible only at a cost of enormous subsidies and transfer payments to the weaker countries, ...

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