The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 - Tanya Reinhart
Published in 2006 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
248 pages
ISBN: 9781844670765
In the early to mid-2000s, I was an awkward and painfully shy preteen, desperately trying to navigate the complex waters of the puberty-stricken middle school social landscape. Raised on farmland within the rural American South, my world was stiflingly narrow and insular, strictly regulated to a conservative Evangelical framework. Within this context, I was not deeply informed about global geopolitical conflicts and remained largely unaware of the complexities of the Middle East conflict.
For context, I was in the first grade when the Twin Towers fell. In its aftermath, the entirety of the conflict was boiled down to “America and Israel are good, while Arab countries are bad.” I grew up in an increasingly reactionary America, willingly blind to its complicity in global systems of oppression while arrogantly projecting a false sense of dominance and superiority on the world stage.
Raised as a Christian Zionist, I learned all of the standard talking points that are used to defend Israel's brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It has taken years to overcome this deeply ingrained programming, as I’ve been digging deeper into the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As such, when I saw a book in my local used bookstore that focused solely on the policies and actions in the region from 2003 to 2006, despite its narrow scope, I was immediately intrigued.
In her 2006 book, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003, the late Israeli writer and academic Tanya Reinhart critically examines the Israeli government's policies and their implications for Palestinians during the early 2000s. Drawing on Israeli media reporting, Reinhart argues that the U.S.–backed "Road Map" brought no genuine progress, and instead functioned as a diplomatic smokescreen for Israel to intensify control over the Occupied Territories. She frames the Road Map not as a path to peace, but as a negotiating façade enabling Israel to cement control and expand its settlements while presenting an image of international legitimacy. In the process, democratic norms within Israel are also undermined, and the Palestinian population faces deeper fragmentation and dispossession.
Overview:
Written in the immediate post–Second Intifada era, the book is a sequel to her earlier work Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (2002), and focuses on three years marked by diplomatic paralysis, expanding settlement infrastructure, and intensified Israeli military control. Primarily utilizing Israeli news sources, Reinhart provides a critical perspective on the events and policies shaping the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank during the early 2000s. Through analyzing the evidence, Reinhart argues that the Road Map and withdrawal rhetoric were not genuine peace initiatives, but tools to cement Israeli strategic goals of settlement expansion, Palestinian isolation, and occupation.
Each section methodically portrays how U.S.-led diplomatic initiatives were subverted or manipulated in favor of persistent Israeli control over occupied territory. What appears as negotiation is, in Reinhart’s framing, a legitimizing diplomatic veneer masking deeper policies of land confiscation, fragmentation, and repression. At the same time, she highlights persistent and courageous resistance efforts that sought to counterbalance these policies.
She also critiques the role of Israeli and Western media in portraying Israel as a victim and peace-seeker, while downplaying or justifying its military actions and settlement expansion. Reinhart argues that this narrative manipulation obscures the realities of occupation and displacement. For example, the construction of the separation barrier in the West Bank is portrayed as a means of annexation and control rather than security. Reinhart highlights how the wall divides Palestinian communities and isolates them from their land, which was purposefully used to undermine the viability of a future Palestinian state.
Despite systemic oppression, Palestinians have engaged in non-violent resistance, particularly along the route of the West Bank border. Reinhart documents these efforts and the solidarity shown by Israeli and international activists, offering first-hand accounts of farmers protecting their land. As such, she offers a glimpse of hope and resilience amidst the adversity and increasing repression from the Israeli government.
Deeper Dive:
The book is organized chronologically, with Reinhart tracking the interplay between high-level diplomatic developments and conditions on the ground in both Gaza and the West Bank. In the Introduction, Reinhart introduces the concept of the "Road Map" peace plan, highlighting its promises of a Palestinian state by 2005. She critiques the plan as a strategic maneuver by Israel to maintain control over Palestinian territories while presenting an image of pursuing peace. She describes her methodological approach of drawing on Israeli media sources to expose the gap between diplomatic rhetoric and the reality on the ground.
In the First Chapter, Reinhart discusses the initial acceptance of the Road Map by Palestinians and their declaration of a ceasefire, primarily focusing on the hopes of peace with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. The three-stage road map proposed in 2003 entailed that Israel would give their word to stop expanding their West Bank settlements if Palestine would crack down on Hamas and other militant political groups. This was initially agreed to, but Israel wanted more aggressive tactics to be utilized, hoping to spark a civil war within the Palestinian territories. Notably, Sharon spoke of the situation in Israel as an occupation, which satiated the liberal contingent of Israeli society by showing a gesture toward building peace, but materially changed nothing on the ground.
Reinhart contrasts this with Israel's intensified military actions, including targeted assassinations and increased harassment of Palestinians. Continuing provocations from Israel and counterattacks from Hamas escalated the tensions in the area. For example, the death of 20 Israelis and the wounding of over 100 by a Hamas suicide bomber became the justification for Israel to amp up assassinations against Hamas leaders. This came to a head with the assassination of Ismail Abu Shanab, one of the founders of Hamas and its most moderate, peace-seeking leader. This effectively ended the cease-fire, sparking widespread protests and continuing violence. Furthermore, the extrajudicial assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, was a violation of international law that went unpunished, strengthening the popularity of Hamas within Palestine and solidifying resistance against Israeli occupation. Through these examples, Reinhart argues that Israel's actions continually undermined the prospects for peace.
In Chapter Two, Reinhart explores Ariel Sharon’s “Disengagement Plan” as a strategic maneuver rather than a concession. Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, which involved evacuating settlements from the Gaza Strip, was not a genuine step toward peace but a strategy to consolidate control over the West Bank. She highlights the slow bureaucratic handling of settler relocation and growing evidence of U.S. pressure through arms‑sale sanctions influencing disengagement. She argues it enabled the redeployment of Israeli military forces around Gaza while accelerating West Bank settlement expansion under the radar of international scrutiny.
In Chapter Three, Reinhart focuses her attention on internal Israeli policy debates about Gaza’s future, including how to consolidate control while curbing Palestinian autonomy. She delves into Israel's policies toward Gaza post-disengagement, describing Gaza as an "open-air prison" and emphasizing the ongoing restrictions and military actions that continued to affect Palestinians in the region. Reinhart argues that the strategy employed in Gaza during this time served as a potential testing ground for practices later deepened in the West Bank.
Chapter Four discusses the period following Yasser Arafat's death, highlighting the leadership challenges faced by the Palestinian Authority. In the wake of Arafat’s death, the West was hopeful that Abu Mazen and Sharon could negotiate peace. Abbas struggled to balance the Israeli imposition of disproportionate security demands on the PA to dismantle not only militias but the entire social infrastructure of political Islam. Meanwhile, tensions between Fatah and Hamas escalated, with Israeli support allegedly backing Fatah elements to suppress Hamas resistance. Yet, despite agreements for a general calm (تهدئة) instead of an outright truce (هدنة), Israel broke it the next day due to the continuation of violence on the border, which often went unreported in Western media. She critiques Israel's response to these changes, arguing that Israel's policies continued to obstruct meaningful negotiations.
In Chapter Five, Reinhart analyzes the Gaza pullout, suggesting that international pressure played a significant role in Israel's decision to evacuate settlements. Reinhart contends that, in the wake of his second election and worries about public opinion, the Bush administration’s sanctions on Israel due to their ties to Chinese arms deals pushed Sharon to follow through with the withdrawal. While it demonstrated the potential impact of global advocacy on Israeli policies, this external pressure was a facade to placate U.S. interests and present Sharon (and thus, Bush) as a man of peace. Satiated after the withdrawal was realized, the U.S. ended its pressure campaign while Israel resumed tightening control over Gaza. With the settlers now gone from the region, Israel could now turn Gaza into a heavily militarized and controlled open-air concentration camp. Cut off from economic and political autonomy and left vulnerable to future escalations, Gaza now became a sealed prison with millions of inhabitants at risk for starvation and the entire population subject to indiscriminate bombing campaigns by the Israeli government.
Following this transformation of Gaza into a sealed enclave separated from the rest of the world and subjected to brutal violence, Chapter Six focuses on the election of Hamas and the swift imposition of sanctions by Israel and the West. The elections, she suggests, reflected Palestinian exhaustion with the Fatah-led PA’s failures, corruption, and perceived collaboration with the state of Israel. The election of Hamas, however, was interpreted as a threat to Israeli and U.S. regional interests. The resulting Israeli reaction was immediate repression framed as resistance to "terror", even amidst Hamas signals of ceasefires or openness to negotiations. Reinhart critiques this reactionary response, as Israel continues to build a narrative that there is no possible partner for peace in Gaza.
In Chapter Seven, Reinhart details the strategy of partitioning the West Bank through the construction of the separation barrier. Citing maps and Israeli planning documents, she estimates the Wall isolates roughly 400,000 Palestinians and potentially annexes up to 40% of West Bank territory. By separating the Palestinian Territories into four enclaves that are surrounded by Israeli forces, Reinhart argues that this policy has turned much of the West Bank into open-air prisons, restricting the movement of Palestinians from one place to another. Reinhart argues that the wall's true purpose was to annex Palestinian land and further entrench Israeli control, rather than to provide security. The Wall is presented not as a security mechanism but as a strategic device to enclose and divide Palestinian communities, annex fertile land, and prefigure a Bantustan-style future of permanent subjugation.
Finally, in Chapter Eight, Reinhart provides first-hand accounts of non-violent resistance to the construction of the West Bank wall that separates farmers from their land, particularly in Bil’in. Reinhart highlights the moral and strategic significance of joint Palestinian–Israeli–international grassroots coalitions, even as they face escalating repression. She documents these joint efforts to oppose the wall's construction, illustrating solidarity and activism in the face of oppression. She also relays the escalating Israeli military responses, such as tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition fired at protestors, as these protests gained global attention, yet also entrenched enclosure policies.
Commendations:
There are several notable strengths to Reinhart’s account. First and foremost, when it comes to sources, Reinhart’s rigorous use of internal Israeli sources offers a unique window into the state’s strategic thinking. As a linguist and political commentator, Reinhart brings a razor-sharp analysis to bear on the post-2003 phase of the Israeli settler-colonial project through the utilization of Hebrew-language military reports, legal decisions, and op-eds, translating them into English for a Western, Anglophone audience. Her ability to weave together macro-level diplomacy with micro-level policy and military action reflects a sophisticated reading of how power dynamics operate in the region. Most notably, this allows her to present a scathing critique of Israeli policy and public opinion as not merely consisting of external condemnation, but also as internal contradiction, revealing the fissures and contentious debates that rage within the settler state itself.
Additionally, Reinhart brings a historian's sense of clarity to place contemporary events into context. She places Israel’s actions within a broader Zionist framework of settlement and exclusion, which has only been exacerbated and further entrenched in the two decades since the book’s publication. She dissects the "Road Map" peace process not as a genuine attempt to end the occupation, but as a geopolitical smokescreen for deepening control over Palestinian land and life. Her work exposes the duplicity at the heart of the so-called disengagement plan, revealing how the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 functioned not as a step toward peace, but as a tactical redeployment intended to deflect international criticism and consolidate West Bank control. By tracing political continuities from the Oslo Accords to the Road Map, she shows how the rhetoric of peace is frequently mobilized to entrench apartheid realities on the ground. This provides readers with a long-view analysis that many policy-focused or journalistic accounts miss.
One of Reinhart’s major contributions is her dissection of how Western governments, particularly the United States and the European Union, have aided Israel diplomatically, economically, and militarily while posing as neutral mediators. As a result, Reinhart’s analysis is invaluable for exposing the performative character of Western-led peace initiatives, piercing the fiction that imperial powers act as neutral brokers. Her work underscores how the “peace process” served to legitimize Israel’s territorial consolidation, echoing classic colonial patterns where negotiations function to entrench settler gains. She deftly illustrates that the so-called international consensus often serves to enable continued occupation, not challenge it. This tacitly affirms that negotiation without equal power is merely a mechanism for the colonizer to buy time or secure dominance under new terms, which is a consistent pattern that we’ve witnessed during the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Furthermore, Reinhart's framing of Israeli control mechanisms such as settlements, checkpoints, and the border wall as tools of fragmentation and enclosure anticipates later theoretical work on carceral geography and infrastructural apartheid. The infrastructure of occupation is not portrayed merely as repressive, but as a territorial matrix of fragmentation designed to foreclose any possibility of nation-building or organizing among the oppressed. Her insight that the West Bank Wall and checkpoints are not defensive but project a “vision of demographic conquest” is pivotal for understanding colonial control through enclosure, mobility restriction, and space-making.
I also deeply appreciated Reinhart’s moral clarity and sense of urgency that she embeds throughout the text. As both an academic and an activist, Reinhart writes with profound empathy for Palestinian suffering. She refuses to speak solely in abstract geopolitical terms, but rather documents real lives devastated by targeted killings, house demolitions, military incursions, ritual humiliation, and imprisonment. By highlighting the stories of individuals who stood up against bulldozers, tear gas, bullets (both rubber and live rounds), and other forms of violence, Reinhart illustrates the occupation and subjugation of the Palestinian people in terms that relate to the average reader.
Finally, at the end of the book, Reinhart centers grassroots resistance, particularly in villages like Bil’in, where nonviolent protest sought to expose the Wall’s illegality and cruelty. She documents and legitimizes Palestinian non-violent resistance as a powerful alternative to both violent resistance and political passivity. This is a necessary counterweight to defeatist or purely victimizing narratives about Palestinians, an idea echoed in Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims. Reinhart affirms that even within oppressive asymmetries, agency and solidarity are not extinguished. Her decision to end the book with this focus on popular resistance avoids the common trap of fatalism and centers Palestinian agency. Her attention to Israeli and international activists who act in solidarity with Palestinians is both strategic and hopeful, gesturing toward the possibility of a broader anti-colonial alliance.
Critique:
On the other hand, however, Reinhart’s analysis is not without its limitations. First, while she is forthright in her condemnation of Israeli policy, her account remains heavily Israeli-centric. While Reinhart is deeply sympathetic and committed to justice, her narrative still largely interprets Palestinian realities through an Israeli intellectual lens, foregrounding Israeli debates, motives, and calculations. As such, Palestinian voices, intellectual traditions, and grassroots theorizing are not given sustained analytical space. The epistemological center of gravity thus remains within Israeli civil society, even as that society is scathingly critiqued from within.
Second, Reinhart missed a key opportunity by not systematically deploying decolonial theory in analyzing and describing the settler-colonial state. While Reinhart describes Israeli practices as constituting “ethnic cleansing” or “apartheid-like,” she does not explicitly frame the conflict in settler-colonial terms, missing an opportunity to situate Israel within broader comparative frameworks (e.g., South Africa, Algeria, or North America). Her focus is empirical and moral, rather than deeply theoretical. As a result, though Reinhart critiques state policy incisively, she tends to focus heavily on political actors such as Sharon, Bush, and the IDF and their decisions in the region; she does not consistently place these within broader structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, or imperialism. For scholars rooted in anticolonial theory, this leaves a gap in connecting structure and history to the contemporary policy maneuvers she documents. A deeper engagement with political economy or settler-colonial theory could have enriched the analysis.
Additionally, her narrative largely treats Palestinian society as monolithic, with little attention to class dynamics or the internal political dynamics in Palestine beyond Fatah–Hamas binaries. While this might reflect the book’s narrow timeline (2003–2006), it limits the potential for analytical richness. For instance, the impact of neoliberal reforms imposed by the Palestinian Authority, or the class interests of security elites in Ramallah, is not deeply explored, despite their relevance to understanding the PA’s complicity in perpetuating the occupation of the West Bank and distancing itself from the events in Gaza.
Furthermore, while Reinhart is highly critical of Israeli policy, she leaves somewhat ambiguous her stance on the two-state solution. Though she exposes its contradictions, she does not fully articulate a clear post-two-state political horizon. As such, a stronger vision of decolonization rooted in bi-nationalism, confederation, or some form of democratic equality could push the conversation further (such can be found in Ghada Karmi’s One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel or, to quote the clunky alternative that Norman Finkelstein proposes, “From the River to the sea, one person, one vote, Palestine will be free”).
Finally, while empirically valuable, her focus on diplomatic and bureaucratic detail sometimes slips into a technocratic register that may limit the book’s affective resonance and political utility for activist readers or theorists seeking structural diagnosis over policy critique. At times, Reinhart’s focus on diplomatic memos, policy documents, and tactical maneuvers (e.g., about disengagement logistics) reads as overly-technocratic and procedural, rather than radical. Her anger is clearly palpable throughout the text, yet it often seems overly restrained in places, reflecting the temperament of a disillusioned liberal trying to maintain a semblance of civility rather than an insurgent decolonial activist who boldly denounces the apartheid regime. As such, this style may limit the book’s capacity to inspire movements or provoke critical pedagogy, compared to more fiery and immediately applicable anticolonial texts.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Road Map to Nowhere is a meticulously researched and morally urgent critique that chronicles the collapse of the peace process between 2003 and 2007, showing how Western diplomacy and Israeli statecraft converged to entrench occupation rather than remedy it. While it falls short of fully decentering Israeli perspectives or engaging in robust theoretical elaboration, Reinhart’s account remains a short but powerful must-read for anyone seeking to understand the failure of the Road Map not as an unintended outcome, but as an intentional outcome by powerful actors. Its empirical insight and political clarity make it essential reading for scholars of Middle Eastern politics, international relations, and the effects of settler colonial violence, specifically in understanding how international diplomacy functioned less as a vehicle for decolonization and more as a legitimizing apparatus for continued occupation.
Unfortunately, Reinhart’s death in the year following this book’s publication stunted her analysis from reaching a wider audience. Despite its attempts to shed light on the policies and attitudes that have been utilized to justify mass displacement and death, Reinhart’s work also reflects its own historical moment, a transitional period when critiques of Zionism and U.S. imperialism were beginning to break into the mainstream but were still cautious about framing the struggle in more radically decolonial terms. Nonetheless, Reinhart's work remains a compelling critique of the Israeli settler state. As she urges readers to question official narratives and consider the lived experiences of Palestinians, one cannot help but think about the voice that was lost and how she would have contributed to the continuing discourse and awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people.
As we move further into the 21st century and we witness growing calls for one democratic state, the greater momentum for boycott and divestment, and a renewed sense of transnational solidarity as more Western countries begin to recognize Palestinian statehood, we must always remember that each of us has a critical role to play in bringing justice and dignity to all peoples. By examining the specific context of this narrow slice of history in the region, Reinhart bore witness to her own historical moment and gave us a crucial resource to study and reflect upon as we work to end the genocide in Gaza. Reinhart’s intervention remains a crucial document in that Reinhart marshals evidence with clarity, holds imperial powers to account, and foregrounds the devastating consequences of settler-colonial expansion dressed up as diplomacy. As such, Reinhart’s work stands as a vital foundation, setting the necessary historical context for our collective efforts to understand and dismantle systems of apartheid and occupation. Such analysis underscores the importance of pairing genuine dialogue with an unshakable fire for justice in tearing down the walls of occupation and injustice and ending the Israeli domination over the Palestinian people.