Artists' sketches of the proposed new city, Rawabi, which is six miles north of Ramallah and hopes to attract young professionals. It includes apartment blocks, olive trees and shaded walkways. (Photograph: Public Domain)

Recently I received a very impressive full-colour booklet printed on expensive paper advertising a development project. The ambitious plan is to build a new Palestinian city, "Rawabi", in the West Bank.

The glossy images inside are not of the Palestine I know. The bulldozers are not demolishing homes, they are breaking ground to make room for the new city. Suited, Palestinian elites appear in lush boardrooms with international partners. The white, symmetrical buildings, typical of hilltop Israeli settlements, are instead part of the scale-model of the future development.

It's crafted for secular, western investors. Women pictured do not wear the traditional headscarf common among most Palestinian women, and the longest beard belongs to an Orthodox Christian priest. The booklet also portrays a Palestine sans occupation: independent and capable of securing investments.

The reality is radically different; Israel occupies the West Bank and blockades Gaza. Israel continues to control the West Bank through checkpoints and roadblocks that often arbitrarily close. Water is disproportionately dominated by a settler class that is privy to Jewish-only roads.

Rawabi may not even succeed. Its plot is surrounded by Israeli settlements and the roads which will connect it to other cities have not been approved by the ultimate authority over the territory: the Israeli government. Rawabi, itself, is not problematic. Rather the growing, fanciful discourse that it fits into, a discourse that emphasises development before independence, is the greater cause for alarm. This is evident in a new document by the Palestinian Authority (PA) entitled Palestine: Moving Forward about the vast institutions the PA seeks to develop to "establish the state of Palestine in two years." (Hussein Ibish discussed it here on Cif yesterday.)

But given the realities of occupation, the same realities ignored in the shiny Rawabi booklet, one has to ask: "Moving forward towards what, exactly?" With little change on the political front, exacerbated by expanding settlements, home demolitions in Arab East Jerusalem, and Israeli statements about retaining settlements deep inside the West Bank and controlling the Jordan Valley, it is hard to imagine these conditions foster a move forward at all. Instead, the development initiatives, in the actual political context, move Palestinians in three directions, and none of them are toward freedom from occupation:

To read the full article please visit The Guardian.