BY 1914, Palestine Railways had the greatest ratio of railroad tracks per capita in the Middle East, a consequence of European capitalist penetration coupled with military strategy.

Today, Israel has an extensive railway network: excluding light rail, the network consisting of 1,511km of track, and is undergoing constant expansion. 

But Gaza and the West Bank have no railway as their 519km of track and its stations have been erased: in Gaza from the Egyptian border to Jaffa via Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza city and in the West Bank from Tulkarm to Nablus.

The Gazan railway was particularly important as a route from Turkey to Egypt in the second world war.

So how did 519km of track disappear? In 1948, the Israeli zionist settler state replaced Britain’s 28-year League of Nations mandate, that had nationalised Palestine Railways (PR) in 1920.

Israel fine-tuned the strategy of colonialist powers, isolating Gaza and the West Bank by blocking rail traffic. In the process, Israel deprived the Palestinian people of the social and economic development benefits of railway infrastructure.

As Edward Said has remarked: “One of the main arguments in early zionist writing about Palestine was that it was uninhabited … the right to use land, or the right to imagine the best use for the land, is a right given to the European, to the white man.”

Railways in Palestine were a natural target for colonial powers: building them with a hefty 5.5 per cent dividend for bondholders of the first railway between Jaffa and Jerusalem (the J&J) — some were built for explicitly military purposes, for example, a line from Jerusalem to Bira built by the British to counter the Turkish threat during WWI. 

Others were ripped up, like the British-built line from Rafah to Beersheba. From 1936, the Palestinian uprising sabotaged railways and the British used military patrols. 

This included the British use of Palestinian hostages as human shields who were placed on special “pony truck extensions” at the front of armoured railcars. 

The revolt targeted the oil refinery at Haifa, its stations and the port. Royal Navy engineers ran the trains and Jewish workers staffed the port and refinery with armed Jewish settlers protecting the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline and the Haifa-Lydda rail line.  

In 1938 sabotage derailed 44 trains, destroyed 27 stations, damaged 21 bridges and culverts and destroyed telephone, signalling equipment and water supplies. In September 1938 the Jerusalem line and El Kantara line were closed by sabotage. 

In fact, as Paul Cotterell has written, British investment in Palestine was minimal and, though British-manufactured train stock was imported with, for example, carriages from the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, there was little forward planning. 

The social apartheid of first, second and third class was rigidly applied. However, during the British mandate, rail travel increased, with a line being built to make Lydda a major hub.

During the war, in 1942, the British opened a route running from Haifa to Beirut and Tripoli. After the war, the Rosh HaNikra tunnel was dug, allowing train travel from Lebanon to Palestine and Egypt. 

But what has been described as an “epidemic of railway terrorism” was launched by zionists in 1947. This included bombings and mines on the Haifa-Kantara and the Jafa-Lydda lines.

Attacks were so frequent and deadly that Palestinian workers called a general strike in protest. Outside Palestine, an attempt to derail a Medloc train in the Austrian Alps failed but a trial run on the Jaffa-Jerusalem line was successful in partially derailing a train. 

When the state of Israel was established in 1948, it took over the existing Palestine Railway system, renaming it Israel Railways in 1949.

This was widely celebrated as a sign of Israel’s emergence, with flags adorning locomotives seemingly like the opening of railways throughout Europe over a century before. 

But this was not a new system but one built by Palestine colonialists in the heyday of European imperialism. Israel had not only become a bulwark of the West in an era marking the end of imperial power globally but also had a ready-made railway which its zionists had carefully studied in order to sabotage it before 1948. 

The fate of Gazan and West Bank rail lines was sealed. Cut off by Israel and Egypt the Gazan rail line was “discontinued” by the 1970s even as it was widely used by Palestinian workers to reach Tel Aviv. 

West Bank rails fell into “disuse” as the current euphemism has it. But we should not conclude that this was simply part of the usual story about rail lines “coming and going” in the region: it was the result of the strategic stranglehold of the Palestinian people by Israel on par with the erasure of Palestinian villages. 

In 2013, Israel’s IDF proposed a Trans-Samarian line from the West Bank to Ariel, a blatant attempt to cater for Jewish settlement rejected by the Palestinian Authority. 

Given the current devastation of Gaza, it might seem that to speak of railways is irrelevant. But plans to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure will require work on a scale rivalling the post-war railway-building of Yugoslavia. And, in the longer term, part of the process of creating a bi-national Palestine.

Dave Welsh is editor of Key Workers United, Norwich.