LaRouche’s Oasis Plan: A Blueprint for Peace through Economic Development in the Middle East

Immediately after the signing of the Oslo Accord in the White House by Israeli and Palestinian leaders in 1993, Lyndon LaRouche and his associates urged the different parties and the international community to implement economic development projects to sustain the peace process. LaRouche and Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) journalists had already developed the “Oasis Plan”, which included both certain economic aspects of what was to become Annex IV of the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accord, plus additional crucial water and power projects they had called for since the mid-1970s.

The Oasis Plan focused primarily on solving the water shortage issue in the region through providing new fresh water by desalination of water taken from the sea. This would be done in two ways: 1. Building the Red Sea-Dead Sea and Mediterranean-Dead Sea canals to bring water to the low Dead Sea basin, using the difference in elevation to generate power to be used for desalination plants; 2. More importantly, building new nuclear power complexes (Nuplexes) along the canals and on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to produce much larger quantities of electricity, both for desalination and to power an industrialization process in Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.

The Nuplexes proposed were to consist of a series of four German Jülich-type pebble bed high temperature reactors. The “new rivers” thus generated would help green the deserts in the region and foster agro-industrial development to all surrounding countries. LaRouche said in a speech in 1994: “One cannot meet the indices of water consumption for a modern population, for both the Palestinian and Israeli populations, under present conditions. There is a conflict over water because the Israelis have, frankly, been using their conquests to take water from everybody. It’s one of the conflicts with Syria on the Golan Heights issue. It involves, in Lebanon, the Litani River, and things of that sort.”

The Oasis Plan also involved transportation infrastructure to establish physical connectivity among all regional nations, starting with the Palestinian territories, with a highway between the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as regional highways and rail networks. An expansion of the Suez Canal was proposed with industrial zones on both sides – which has been accomplished by Egypt in recent years.

LaRouche had argued since 1975 that Southwest Asia, at the crossroads of civilizations, has a unique position as an industrial and logistics hub, being geographically located between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and between Europe, Asia, and Africa. The use of oil and gas as a feed stock for industrial production, such as petrochemical industries to produce plastics, paints, and many useful materials, rather than exporting it as raw material, was to transform this region economically. This has since become a key feature of the 2013 China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. Scientific, technological, and cultural cooperation and exchanges were another key element in the transformative process the Oasis Plan represented.

Using this region today as a land-bridge between continents, with the major powers like the U.S., China, Russia, and the EU contributing to its development, will not only stabilize the area, but also lead to better relations among the superpowers.