Soccer Dad

Fayyad's facade

The Washington Post's Howard Schneider profiles PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, A Palestinian Technocrat Rises Steadily, but Questions Persist. The profile is generally positive but Schneider notes some of the problems that Fayyad faces.

Here's one:

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian pollster and analyst, said Fayyad tends to fare poorly in popularity compared with Abbas or with more charismatic figures such as jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Islamist movement's de facto government in Gaza.

There's something missing here. Barghoutin and Haniyeh are not just popular because of their charisma, they're popular because of their terrorist activities.

At the end Schneider takes issue with an analysis by Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari that's critical of the West's investment in Fayyad.

Schneider writes:

Analysts Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari argued in a recent paper written for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think tank considered close to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that the United States was "naive" to think its support for Fayyad would help him succeed without more local backing.

That, Fayyad said, is something Israel could help with. He argues that his security efforts will obligate Israel, under international agreements such as a 2003 "road map" for peace, to take steps of its own -- including freezing Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and stopping military incursions into areas put under Palestinian control according to the Oslo accords.

Note that, encouraged the Obama administration, Fayyad, of course calls for a freeze on "settlement construction."

But Schneider ignores some of the other criticisms of Fayyad in Diker's and Inbari's analysis. It also ignores ways that Fayyad himself works against peace with Israel. Palestiniann Media Watch continues to find that the PA is fighting a PR war against Israel over Jerusalem. Diker and Inbari note that Fayyad has been funding Hamas. And while everyone is parsing Binyamin Netanyahu's words to determine whether or not he accepts a two state solution, Schneider, like so many other ignores that Fayyad denies that Israel is a Jewish state.

In the end, Fayyad is better than most Palestinian leaders. But he has no real constituency, because he is not sufficiently opposed to Israel's existence. If peace will come in the Middle it will be when someone like Fayyad rises to power rather than being imposed from the outside. But that will take a remaking of Palesitnian nationalism, something that has yet to happen and won't happen anytime soon.

Crossposted on Yourish