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Israel Studies 9.2 (2004) 180-217



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Constructing the Trans-Israel Highway's Inevitability

Introduction

Overview

This essay discusses the creation of a sense of inevitability as a key dimension in furthering a major infrastructure project, the Trans-Israel Highway.1 I illustrate some of the rhetorical and political moves that helped achieve this inevitability.

While important in itself as an elucidation of an infrastructure project declared to be the country's largest ever, the lessons of this analysis extend beyond this project and the Israeli context. I would argue that the construction of inevitability is a prerequisite of any large project. A low profile can be important in the early phases of a project—in the vulnerable stages while it gathers resources and takes shape; but when it comes to approval and resource allocation, before contracts are signed and asphalt is poured, a road—especially something as massive as a proposed 300 kilometer highway running the length of a small country—must become substantial in people's awareness. From a contested tenuous notion, one among many, it must be stabilized and ultimately come to overwhelm the space of possibilities. A sense of inevitability is one of the most valuable achievements for project proponents; undermining it, the crux of opponents' efforts.

There are several aspects of inevitability that can be disentangled. There is the straight-forward and often positive aspect: the confidence and vision of a project's proponents, their own conviction (real or projected) that the project is going to happen, no matter what, and their vigorous actions based on this. One can certainly identify this kind of inevitability in the case of the Trans-Israel, especially after it was taken over by a well-funded public company, formed expressly to execute the project. The key figures in the company—most of them former high-ranking military officers—were adept at making things happen, with personal histories of transforming concept into reality. Stemming from their confidence, know-how, [End Page 180] and resources was a set of unequivocating actions—the systematic lobbying, preparation of plans, enlistment of supporters, and so on—that built a momentum (velocity and mass of efforts) that swept over the planning apparatus, and with which detractors could simply not keep up.

But I want to focus here on some more subtle kinds of inevitability creation. These worked in parallel to the more brute efforts of pushing a project forward and, more obliquely, dissolving the possibility and relevance of alternatives rather than meeting them head on. Power has been defined as the ability to have one's point of view seen as "point-of-view-less." I will present four discursive-political ploys that augmented the project's power in this way, drawing on and reworking the past, present, and future so as to implicitly narrow the space of possibilities toward a single outcome: the proposed project. The four mechanisms I discuss are the following.

  1. Shaping and proliferating a problem definition that pointed inescapably to the proposed project as a solution. In this case, drawing on an outmoded transport paradigm and shaky comparative statistics to shape and propagate a problem framing (of congestion and a "lag in road infrastructure") whose obvious remedy was additional road infrastructure.
  2. Rewriting and telling the project's history as the timely unfolding and gathering momentum of a long-established plan. This post-hoc account masked the project's halting, opportunistic, contested, and haphazard trajectory, its mutating nature, and the strenuous efforts necessary to propel it forward in the face of opposition.
  3. A concerted effort to limit debate to issues internal to the project itself. Thus project proponents strove to limit discussion to issues such as the Highway's staging, costs, routing, etc., and exclude from debate any discussion of, and spokespeople for, issues outside this project "box"—especially those that might have raised questions about the need for the box itself.
  4. Attempts to bring the project's future into the present and past—these achieved, or presented as already achieved, components of the project prior to its approval and execution. This...

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