In Suisman’s view, he wanted to alter both sides’ perceptions: “I imagined a two-sided mirror. Everyone looks at their side and they can only see themselves. As an assimilated American Jew, I suddenly had a chance to go through the mirror.” Suisman knew that, for most Palestinians, they could only see their own suffering, which had stemmed from the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of 1948, when violence erupted as the Jewish state was created. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had lost their homes. Villages were burned to the ground. “I thought, Both sides of the mirror are true, but we have to get rid of the mirror.”
It was not to be. The legislative election, which Hamas won handily in 2006, brought pure chaos. Its militants turned on the PA, murdering scores of Palestinians, throwing some of them off of buildings.
In January I found myself on the way to an office that Ruthenberg maintains in Dumbo. Arc veteran Rob Lane, whose post-9/11 projects had taught him how to grapple with the endless delays of Manhattan redevelopment, had tapped Ruthenberg—the New York partner of ORG Permanent Modernity, a large Brussels planning company—to run the operation. With his silver hair and a neatly trimmed beard, Lane, 66, is a Harvard Loeb fellow who favors the dark jeans and black running shoes that seem to be a uniform among urban planners. Ruthenberg tends toward elegant sweaters and designer glasses.
“We were 50,000 feet up in the air,” Lane told me, describing Suisman’s dream of connecting the territories. “Now our challenge in the new Arc was to bring it down to six feet off the ground: How can we make this actually work?” Suisman, while hopeful that Lane and his cohorts can make real progress, told me, sadly: “The war could set them back a generation.”
Some cynics, of course, see urban planning during wartime as a guise for opportunistic profiteers to circle a conflict zone like vultures. Others see well-intentioned individuals who can come off as predatory. Jared Kushner, for instance—whose private equity firm received a $2 billion investment from the Saudis and who, as Trump’s Middle East envoy, was the architect of the Abraham Accords, intended to strengthen ties “between Israel and its neighbors”—has touted Gaza’s “waterfront property” as “very valuable,” leaving some with the impression that Israel might want to continue to displace residents while they “clean it up.” In the main, however, the truly engaged players in a future Gaza—regardless of any other motives—are governments and businesses driven by civic and humanitarian concerns, genuinely determined to find a way forward.
In fact, a derby race of sorts has emerged among competing “day after” plans. One formula floated by some close to Netanyahu: a consortium including Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the US sharing the oversight of Gaza. Then there’s the Vandenberg Plan, which envisions an Arab mandate run by the Saudis and the Gulf states, to someday turn Gaza into a version of Dubai. Such a plan, being promoted by a team that includes Abrams, would give cover to the Israelis, allowing them to avoid the debacle of an endless occupation and to circumvent the agonies that might come under a new Hamas-run entity, aided by Iran. These plans are political and economic, but all will require a spatial vision for the West Bank and Gaza. Participants in the respective proposals either collaborate or are in talks with one another.
Late last year and into 2024, Ruthenberg and Lane had been working nonstop. They met a tight mid-April deadline to deliver the Gaza design proposal to RAND; their West Bank study is due midsummer. The weekend before one of my visits to their Dumbo office, pro-Palestinian protesters had amassed on the Brooklyn Bridge. Benny Gantz, Israel’s former defense minister, in a show of defiance toward Netanyahu—in whose unity government he had served before resigning in protest in June—was on his way to Washington to meet with Kamala Harris. That day’s New York Times featured three full pages of Palestinian war dead—scholarship students, new mothers, accountants, teachers.
The travails facing the Arc team are ones that Suisman had never imagined on his hardest days: “The most devastating urban warfare in the modern record,” so The Wall Street Journal stated. By mid-December, 29,000 bombs, munitions, and shells had been dropped on the strip. Most hospitals were shut and nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s homes destroyed, along with ancient mosques and Byzantine churches, not to mention olive and citrus groves, which had been staples of Gaza’s agricultural economy.
Each aspect of development in the territories has always had to take into account the terrain, the materials, bureaucratic snags, and an Israeli mindset and system that treats Palestinians as second-class citizens. But of all the inequities of the occupation, Shireen Shelleh told me, those involving water rights are among the most contentious. The 600,000 Israeli settlers in Area C (administered by Israel), for example, are allotted six times the amount of water designated for the nearly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
A part of Shelleh’s skill set is to break through the grinding obstacles of dealing with the Joint Water Committee, which have forever haunted her projects. In one of our first conversations, she recounted her firm’s ongoing 12-year struggle to get a single water permit for a West Bank sanitation facility it had developed, bordering an Arab village and a Jewish settlement in Area C.
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