Fayyad's Road to Palestine

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — I spoke to the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, for 90 minutes, and the word he uttered most often, by far, was “security.” As in, “The absence of security has been our undoing.”

When Palestinian leaders are talking about their self-inflicted undoing, as well as the undoing inflicted on them by Israel, things may be starting to move.

His aim, Fayyad told me, was an end to the “security pluralism” that produced a “state of chaos and militias.” It was this chaos, he said, that fueled the violent schism between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, undermining past Palestinian attempts to build the rudiments of statehood.

Fayyad, 58, is a small, precise, U.S.-educated man with a very ordered mind. He builds long, intricate sentences with an academic bent and is given to words like “axiomatic” or “purview.” For almost a decade his home was the World Bank; he’s hardly a political firebrand. Armed struggle has never been his thing. But right now he is a man with a mission.

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