Constructing the Trans-Israel Highway's Inevitability

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.