Power and Trade: The Israeli-Palestinian Economic Protocol

Abstract

Economics have been so central to the Arab-Israeli accommodation effort over the last two years that there sometimes appears to be a deliberate attempt to submerge political issues. As an example of the intimate interaction between politics and economics, accommodation has been marketed as the road to regional prosperity while the prosperitycoupled with the creation of economic interdependencies-is being billed as the guarantee for the accommodation's durability. These premises are exemplified in the Casablanca Declaration issued on 1 November 1994 at the end of the two-day Middle East/North Africa Economic Summit that was attended by high-level official delegates, businessmen, and specialists from the two regions, Europe, the United States, and other countries.* The premises can be argued and deserve a separate analysis. Nonetheless, the vision of mutually-reinforcing peace and prosperity has been very much in evidence in the Palestinian-Israeli accommodation process as well. It underlies, in particular, the pledge of $2.4 billion by