The Success That Failed

 The story of Salam Fayyad, the bold Palestinian PM nobody had the courage to back

The most progressive and innovative Palestinian thinker on a Middle East peace settlement has been steadily isolated over the past several years. Undercut by Israel, undermined by his own people’s factionalism, unable to meet even once with President Obama, this dynamic Palestinian leader is now close to the end of his rope.

The story of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the enfeebled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, is a case study in wasted opportunity. Obama, who chose not to see Fayyad during his first term, may do so during his visit to the region next month. What the president will hear is how bad things happen when America looks away. 

Texas-educated, more interested in the future than a tormented past, a former International Monetary Fund official determined to fight corruption and establish security, a doer not a dreamer, Fayyad was a new kind of Palestinian leader: a nonviolent pragmatist with a genuine readiness for territorial compromise. 

To Israel he was a conundrum: a potential partner but also the politician from hell. For if Fayyadism was the new reasonable face of Palestine, why could putative Palestine not come into being? 

In Ramallah last month I sat down with Fayyad for a couple of hours. I had negotiated the time-warp traverse from Israel to the West Bank, through the barrier into the mess Israelis would rather not think about, past the striking teachers who had not been paid because the Palestinian Authority is starved for cash, and found the prime minister, dapper as ever, in a dark mood. His program of preparation for statehood, which won a World Bank stamp of approval before its completion in August 2011, was a success that failed: It led nowhere. 

“Everything evolved negatively,” Fayyad told me. “In deeds, Israel never got behind me; in fact it was quite hostile. The occupation regime is more entrenched, with no sign it is beginning to relinquish its grip on our life.

“There are more settlements, more settler violence, more intrusiveness into all aspects of Palestinian life, and there are overlooked actions that are wholly unacceptable, like systematically making the Jordan Valley, about a quarter of our land mass, inhospitable. 

“I was in a tent with people there recently — most Palestinian life in the valley is nomadic — and they were meters away from a water main. Not only did they not have access to running water, even water tanks were subject to periodic confiscation by the Israeli Army.” 

As we spoke, three unarmed Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank in disputed circumstances by the Israeli Defense Forces since the start of the year — two young men aged 15 and 16, and a 22-year-old woman walking on a college campus south of Bethlehem. “The treatment of nonviolent protest has been very violent,” Fayyad noted. 

Not one Israeli was killed in the West Bank in 2012. Under Fayyad, the U.S.-backed training of Palestinian security forces, with cooperation from Israel, has brought guns into state control — a prerequisite for statehood. Israel in general enjoys a calm that has allowed jobs and better pay to become Israelis’ main preoccupation and the Palestinians a peripheral issue. The West Bank economy has grown in difficult circumstances. 

Yet despite speaking for the first time in 2009 of two states for two peoples, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seemed intent on sending this message to Fayyad: Good behavior brings further punishment.

“People say Netanyahu remains in power for the sake of power,” Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Israeli political scientist, told me. “I don’t agree. He has a core agenda. He is not going to give up one inch of Eretz Israel. He stays in power for that. The speech about two states was a tactic that gained three years of peace and quiet. He said it and did nothing about it.” Eretz Israel is a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, encompassing all of the West Bank. 

 Or, as a disillusioned member of the outgoing Netanyahu government put it to me: “The world does not believe we are serious about two states because of the settlement policy. If we are building all over the place, where is the Palestinian state?” 

Fayyad sees a de facto attempt to undermine the Palestinian Authority. “I still believe the Authority is a key building block in the effort to resolve the conflict,” he said. “Then somebody needs to explain to me how something viewed as central to building peace is left on the ropes for three years, reeling under bankruptcy, and every action is taken to erode its political viability. 

“We have sustained a doctrinal defeat. We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. Our people question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened. This is the result of nothingness. It is not just that we have been having a bad day.” 

Part of that “nothingness” emanated from Obama’s Washington. “After the failed attempt to stop Israeli settlement expansion, the administration gave up,” Fayyad told me. “After the first year in office, U.S. diplomacy shifted to maintenance — getting a process going rather than looking at the issues.” 

So there has been negative drift, largely peaceful but increasingly uneasy. “The risk this situation poses is of sliding back to a cycle of violence,” Fayyad said. “When you keep getting banged on the head, you know one day it will be one bang on the head too many.” 

He identified some of the issues: settlement expansion; Israeli military incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas; the failure to extend the Palestinian security presence in the West Bank; the “complex and capricious” process of gaining access to the more than 60 percent of the West Bank known as “Area C” and under direct Israeli military control; the Israeli use of tax revenues as a spigot that can be turned on and off to hurt the Palestinian Authority; the lack of access to 3G technology and Israeli control of frequencies; the difficulty of exporting to Israel. All of these factors together, Fayyad said, had made governance “an exercise in impossibility.” 

Then, of course, there is the internal Palestinian question, now referred to as the “reconciliation” issue. The Palestinian national movement is crippled by its split. Hamas rules in Gaza. President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah rule in the West Bank. 

The Palestinians have still not decided whether the war is between two nationalisms with rival claims to the same land — one that could in theory be settled by territorial compromise, as Fayyad passionately believes — or whether it is an anti-colonial war, comparable to the Algerian conflict, whose end result must be the expulsion of the Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel, as Hamas contends. 

The absolutist approach — not compromise at the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps but rejection of the 1947 U.N. resolution to create the modern state of Israel — has led to Palestinian defeat and humiliation. All the evidence is that it would continue to do so. 

So far reconciliation talks have produced only accords that have proved meaningless. “This rivalry and instability are very destructive,” Fayyad said. “The most basic requirement for this plane to take off is, first, security. If we all commit to nonviolence, this will be basic to our interests. We need to formalize this: The path of nonviolence to freedom. If we can unify under that banner, it would be an adequate basis. After all, much of the current coalition in Israel does not subscribe to a two-state solution.” Hamas, the prime minister noted, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the United States now “deals in an open way.”

The other essential ingredient for the Palestinian movement is elections this year, Fayyad said. “Elections are critical. The thing I lament most is the absence of a functioning legislature. We need to rebuild our political system democratically with elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Democracy cannot be holding an election once. I think President Abbas should issue a decree calling for elections and if Hamas says no, so be it.”

The prime minister continued: “I have no sense of entitlement. I have done what I could; I am completely satisfied over that and at peace with myself. I don’t want to be a source of pain to anyone. It is just not acceptable to continue doing this while preaching democracy. A functioning legislature can give you a pink slip. The fact that there is not one does not mean there should not be a self-imposed restraint.”

Fayyad has reached the limit. Fayyadism is another matter. “People will go back to this story,” he mused. “It was about a new way of thinking. And ideas have lasting power.” 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/opinion/global/roger-cohen-The-Story-of-Palestinian-Prime-Minister-Salam-Fayyad-.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home