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The success that failed

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 Barack 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 programme 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. “Indeed, 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.”

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 PA 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, US 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.

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 per cent 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 United Nations 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. Hamas, the prime minister noted, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the United States now “deals in an open way.”

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.”

Roger Cohen is a senior columnist with the IHT