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Salam Fayyad: No Savior

(Foreign Policy) Nathan J. Brown - With Fatah and Hamas striving to form a unity government, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad may very well be sacrificed on the altar of Palestinian unity. Fayyad assumed control of a Palestinian Authority that was unable to pay all of its salaries, deeply mistrusted by Israel, and treated as irrelevant by many Palestinians. His first and most impressive accomplishment was to gain the trust of Western governments, which allowed him to attract enormous amounts of aid. But Fayyadism was a political house of cards. There was no domestic foundation for Fayyad's efforts; for Palestinians, he was simply an unsolicited gift from the U.S. and Europe. His poll numbers did not translate into any kind of political party that could have run in, much less won, an election - if one were ever held. It is a paradoxical and erroneous assumption that the best way to build Palestinian institutions is to rely on a specific, virtuous individual. The writer is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
2011-06-21 00:00:00
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