'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Fayyad interview; and the meaning of his resignation

Is Salam Fayyad—a Palestinian economist who was ‘parachuted’ into the position of Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister under strong US influence in June 2007—now following in the footsteps of Iraq’s Nuri al-Maliki and Lebanon’s Fouad Siniora by declaring a new degree of independence from US tutelage and a new level of commitment to the broad national interests of his own people?

On March 7, Fayyad announced he had tendered his resignation to PA president Mahmoud Abbas. He explained that he was stepping down so he would not be an obstacle in the formation of a national unity government that would enjoy the support of both the big Palestinian political movements, Fateh and Hamas.

However, in recent weeks Fayyad has given several indications that his attitude towards the always halfhearted peace diplomacy of the United States—the country in which he has spent most of his adult life—has become more critical. This raises the intriguing possibility that he might re-emerge as PA prime minister even within a national unity government in which Hamas would have strong influence.

Thus far, however, Hamas spokesmen have remained skeptical of Fayyad’s motives, with one of them describing his resignation as just another “tactical maneuver” by the Americans.

(Update Tuesday 7 a.m.: Hamas's skepticism about the meaning/intention of Fayyad's resignation would seem to have been considerably justified by the leaks coming out of Hillary's entourage to the effect that the resignation, and the manner in which he effected it, was actually just "a tactical move, designed to pressure Hamas into softening its opposition to Fayyad serving as prime minister in a unity government." But perhaps the leaks themselves, rather than or even in addition to the resignation itself, were the ploy? I discuss that possibility and some of its implications at greater length here.)

In an interview I conducted with Fayyad on February 24, when he was already clearly contemplating his resignation move, he expressed a newly tough nationalist position on Israel’s non-compliance with commitments its government has made to the international community on halting settlement construction, halting IDF incursions into PA-controlled areas of the West Bank, and removing barriers to access to Gaza, between Gaza and the West Bank, and within the West Bank itself.

(Fayyad also reportedly made many of these same arguments to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he met her in Ramallah on March 3.)

In the interview with Just World News, Fayyad said,

My worries continue about my plan to gain freedom for our people so we can live in harmony with all our neighbors, including Israel. The prospects of gaining this goal are now receding. If Israel goes ahead with its plan to develop the E-1 area, that will be the end of our hopes for a two-state solution.

Also, what is happening in Jerusalem is very worrying, with the Israelis’ threat to demolish 88 houses in East Jerusalem.

... The international community has invested heavily in the two-state solution, and not only financially. If the two-state solution is to keep its credibility as an option three things need to happen:

First, there has to be a complete settlement freeze everywhere in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem, and there has to be the removal of settlement outposts in line with the 2002 Road Map as was also reaffirmed at Annapolis. This is not negotiable.

Second, Israel has to change its behavior in the West Bank. It has to stop the incursions into Areas A and B, and return to the positions of September 28, 2000, as also called for in the Road Map. We have proved we have restored law and order throughout the West Bank, so they have no pretext to send their own forces in, and every time they do that it undermines us very seriously.

Third, regarding access issues, we need to see the implementation of the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, including not only access into Gaza but also the link between Gaza and the West Bank and restoration of freedom of movement inside the West Bank.

The first two of those requirements are non-negotiable. The third one maybe needs some further interpretation.

If we look at the peace process like a private company then I would say that unless those requirements are met, I personally would not buy stocks in this company!

Fayyad is not a member of either Fateh or Hamas.  After many years working as an economist in the U.S., including with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, in 1995 he went to Ramallah to head the mission IMF sent to help the infant PA establish its financial and economic system. In 2001, he switched to being the PA’s finance minister.

Then, in the PA’s parliamentary elections of January 2006, he ran for election as a member of the newly formed, basically ‘technocratic’ Third Way Party.  It won 2.4% of the popular vote, which gave it two members of the 132-member Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Hamas was the big winner in those elections.  It is not known whether they had any strong interest in having Fayyad stay on as finance minister.  But anyway, the US and Israel put extremely—in some cases potentially lethally-- strong pressure on all the political independents in the PLC not to join a Hamas-led government at that time; and none of them did.

However, when Fateh and Hamas had their short-lived earlier experience of a unity government, after they concluded the Mecca Agreement of February 2007, Fayyad joined that government as finance minister. He made clear in the interview that when he did that, his commitment to having the PA meet the three conditions that the US-designed ‘Road Map’ specified for it was clear, and well-known to everyone, including Hamas.

In June 2007, however, the Mecca Agreement collapsed amidst intra-Palestinian clashes, many of which had clearly been instigated by the US-trained and US-financed Fateh forces.  As tensions mounted, the Fateh forces in Gaza collapsed and pro-Hamas units then expelled the Fateh remnants completely from the Strip. Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who had been prime minister in both the post-election and the post-Mecca governments, then established a Hamas-only government in Gaza while the strongly US-backed PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, set up a parallel ‘emergency’ government in Ramallah headed by Fayyad.

Since February 26 of this year, Fateh, Hamas, and the other Palestinian movements—all of which are considerably smaller than those two—have been engaged in a new round of negotiations, in Cairo, over forming a national unity government, a project for which Fayyad expressed some slightly guarded support in the interview.

He said that the problem of division in Palestinian ranks

has existed for a very long time; indeed it preceded the present rift with Hamas. It is not an easy problem…

But despite the fundamental differences in the platforms of the two movements, we need to remember that the PLO wasn’t always as we see it today. It evolved over time: the turning point was 1988, when the PLO offered major compromises. So political evolution occurs, and it may or may not occur with Hamas.

Secondly, we need to remember that all the Palestinians agree on the fundamental point that the occupation of 1967 needs to end and we need to have an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The difference between us is whether that is enough.

Thirdly the PLO represents all Palestinians, and it fully subscribes to the two-state solution as the end of the conflict with Israel.

So what we need to do is on the one hand work to get the PLO platform adopted by everyone, and on the other, to govern ourselves in such a way that we can manage the differences between us.

The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) is the historic Palestinian nationalist movement, founded in 1964.  Today, it serves as a broad umbrella movement that tries to  represent the interests of all Palestinians, both those who by virtue of their current residence in the West bank and Gaza are represented by (and vote in the elections of) the PA and the very much larger number of Palestinians who are exiled from their historic homeland, living inside or outside refugee camps in the Middle East and also scattered throughout many other parts of the world.

Though the western media focus heavily on political developments within the much narrower confines of the PA, the PLO remains very important in Palestinian politics.  Indeed, the PA itself can best be understood as a sub-project of the broader PLO since it was born out of the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which was concluded between the Government of Israel and the PLO, and was accompanied by a formal exchange of recognitions between those two parties.

And, as Fayyad noted, it had been the decision the PLO took back in 1988 to offer recognition to Israel within its post-1948 borders that had paved the way for the whole negotiation that led to the Oslo Agreement.

Since the late 1960s, the PLO has been strongly dominated by Fateh. Other players there include an alphabet soup of other, much smaller secular nationalist movements, many of them with ties to different Arab states. Hamas, by contrast, has never been a part of the PLO.  For a number of years now, Hamas has expressed an interest in joining the PLO, while many Fateh leaders have expressed continuing fears that Hamas sought not to join it but to replace it.

Not surprisingly, the question of the terms on which Hamas might join the PLO is one of the key issues in the current national reconciliation negotiations in Cairo. Hamas MPs told me in Ramallah recently that they insist that the PLO be thoroughly democratized. They argued—with considerable justification—that PLO’s governance system has become deeply ossified and is now completely unaccountable to the people whom it claims to represent.  (Though Hamas was only a late convert to the governance system instituted in the occupied territories by the PA, these MPs also argued that a system of regular elections very similar to the PA’s should also be introduced at the level of the broader PLO.)

In the interview with Fayyad I asked whether he expected the negotiations in Cairo to result in enough agreement between the parties to allow the crossings into Gaza to be opened?

He said, “Hamas has indicated its willingness to have the PA at the crossings. But we need to see action on this promise from them. They can’t dictate to us who will be there, or how they’ll operate.”

I asked whether he judged that the international community was more supportive of Palestinian unity now than in 2007. 

He noted that, “Security Council resolution 1860 tells us that the world encourages that”—as indeed, it does.

He also reflected on his experience in the earlier national unity government, in 2007:

Some of us assert that the opposition of the international community doomed the government but I disagree. It collapsed because of the internal discord—because of the violent takeover of the government in Gaza by Hamas.

It is important for us to take our own initiatives. My attitude when I joined the national unity government was to pursue my pragmatic goal. And just before I joined it, I noted publicly that I supported the Road Map conditions and the PLO’s previous commitments. I had even written an op-ed for the LA Times in which I spelled this out explicitly. So yes, my support for the PLO’s commitments was well-known to everyone before I joined.

Also, when I was in the national unity government, I had an open meeting with Condoleezza Rice. So it’s not true that the national unity government was completely isolated by the international community. It was boycotted only by Israel. In fact, the process was starting to work a bit, and to gain some recognition from the international community, before it collapsed.

I pressed him further on whether, this time around, he thought that Fateh and Hamas could reach an entente more successful than the fragile one reached in 2007.  He responded,

If that is not possible, then we have no possible statehood. If this problem between them is not fixed, then that is the end of decades of struggle for freedom and independence.

The situation is urgent.  Israel doesn’t have territorial ambitions in Gaza, but it clearly does for the West Bank, including Jerusalem. Settlement activity has if anything accelerated since Annapolis. It is very serious, indeed! So we could see the end of our ambition to have an independent state in the West bank and Gaza.

However, if the parties fail to agree at this point, there would be something we could do. We could just accept the fact that we can’t agree but insist on de-escalation of the internal conflict, and agree to end the internal hostilities. We could say that for now the parties can’t agree—but agree on de-escalation.

He emphasized, however, the urgency of the need for new elections in both the West Bank and Gaza:

We have to have a date certain for these elections, for both the president and the parliament of the PA-- regardless of whether the negotiations for a national unity government succeed or not. The sooner the better for these elections. And yes, of course, election outcomes should be respected. 

All the parliamentarians whom Israel is still holding need to be released, and so do all the political prisoners... Release of prisoners is an urgent issue, not a final-status issue. Yes, the parliamentarians certainly need to be released.

New elections would guard the unity of the West Bank and Gaza and give the people hope that the internal divide can be ended. Also, the prospect of elections would force the political leaders to be attentive to the needs of the people, rather then engaging in continued violence.

New elections are indeed very necessary if the PA’s project is to retain any of the, already very fragile political legitimacy that it now has.  Mahmoud Abbas’s term as president ran out in January. The legality of the move under which he named Fayyad as ‘emergency’ prime minister back in 2007 has always been strongly contested. And perhaps most damaging of all to the political legitimacy of the whole PA project has been the fact that ever since June 2006 Israel has held around 40 of the PLC’s duly elected members in prisons in Israel, bringing against them only very clearly politicized charges of contact with hostile entities, or in some cases, no charges at all.

The legitimacy of the PA project is also heavily criticized at a broader level by many Palestinians since the clear expectation of all Palestinians back in 1993 was that the Oslo Agreement would lead to the establishment of a fully independent Palestinian state within just a few years.  The text of Oslo itself stipulated that the negotiations for a final-status agreement between the two sides would be concluded in May 1999. That deadline came and went. Now, ten years later, negotiations for a final-status agreement are still nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, in the 16 years since Oslo, Israel has more than doubled the number of illegal settlers whom it has implanted into the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

If the PA can hold elections for a new president and new parliament, that would not in itself solve the deeper problems of the post-Oslo diplomacy’s complete non-performance for the Palestinians, but it could give the PA project as a whole a bit of a needed boost. Plus, just the process of organizing and holding the elections throughout the occupied Palestinian territories could help to underline the political unity of all these territories, including East Jerusalem. And this, at a time when the Israeli authorities have been undertaking several worrying new attacks on the rights of East Jerusalem’s 220,000 Palestinians.

Fayyad described his vision of how he seeks to further the Palestinian cause in the following terms:

‘Normalcy’, as we see it here in the occupied Palestinian territories, should be a step on the way to national independence, not a substitute for it…

The platform of our government is to get to freedom and independence by building facts on the ground. We’ll continue to do what we can to stick around… We need to build toward statehood despite the fact we’re living under occupation, with the goal of ending the occupation. Our campaign to do this is wholly built on nonviolence…

Yes, it will take a long time, but when we get where we’re going it will be because of our approach.

He explained that the nonviolent campaign he sees himself as leading operates at both the top-down and the grassroots level; and he talked about the different parts of the West Bank where he’s been able to visit, see conditions, and provide some funds to strengthen local communities. “So it’s a bifocal strategy: it operates at both levels,” he said.

Fayyad and the people who work with him describe many different campaigns he has pursued, in different parts of the occupied West Bank (but not in East Jerusalem), both to strengthen local Palestinian communities through targeted investment and to “resolve tour people’s security problems” by suppressing any Palestinian armed movements that are not under the PA’s—and in practice, under Fayyad’s-- own strict control.

Under Fayyad, the PA’s security forces have been strongly criticized by many Palestinians for crackdowns that have resulted in the imprisonment of around 300 Palestinian dissidents, and the death in security force hands of at least one dissident imam. Palestinians have noted that on occasion PA security forces have intervened to prevent unarmed demonstrators from even approaching IDF positions deep inside the West Bank; and that the PA forces have done nothing to prevent IDF snatch squads, assassination squads, or reconnaissance squads from operating even in the heart of allegedly PA-controlled cities.

On the other hand Fayyad and his supporters claim they have restored a very welcome level of calm to previously lawless areas like central Nablus or Jenin.  And Fayyad himself has—unlike Abbas—made a point of traveling around the West Bank to places like the village of Bil’in to express his strong support for the nonviolent actions that village residents have maintained for many years now against Israel’s continuing encroachments on their land.

Many Palestinians also note that during the recent Gaza war, Fayyad positioned himself in a politically much smarter way than Abbas.  In the early days of the war Abbas openly blamed Hamas for having provoked Israel’s harsh attacks on Gaza; Fayyad never did that, and was seen as expressing greater support for a speedy ceasefire and greater sympathy for the great losses suffered by Gaza’s people, than Abbas.

In the interview with me, Fayyad also expressed stronger criticisms of the US’s past role than anything that has recently been expressed by Abbas. 

He said,

In addition to what I said earlier about the preconditions for the success of our campaign, we need a paradigm shift from the US, away from thinking in advance of any negotiations that any settlement of our conflict needs to be acceptable to Israel.  What we need instead is to see the implementation of the terms of international law, which can’t be treated merely as recommendations.

The Americans need to realize that with the PLO’s Declaration of Independence in 1988 we gave a major and painful compromise. We gave up our claim on 78% of our homeland.

Americans need to realize that the Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.

Fayyad seems to be a mild-mannered man.  But as he stated that last point, he showed the more animation than he had displayed at any other point in the interview, chopping one arm down in the air beside him a few times as he sat and talked, for emphasis. 

“Our position,” he continued,

is essentially that of the Arab Peace Initiative, which is the same as the position underlying the Madrid Conference, and the same as the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988.   International law needs to be brought into our conflict with Israel as the equalizer. Otherwise, we are simply left at the mercy of the stronger party.

The world perhaps thought we were ready to make yet more concessions. But if so, they thought that wrongly.