Palestine's Man in the Middle

Fayyad is a technocratic revolutionary. He is a small man, a little pudgy, and wears smart suits and wire-rimmed glasses. He is sixty and looks seventy. He was born in Deir al-Ghusun, in the West Bank, and educated in Beirut and, finally, at the University of Texas, where he received a doctorate in economics. He worked for the I.M.F. and the World Bank before being appointed finance minister by Yasser Arafat. As Prime Minister, he devised an insistent ideology of constant construction and development in the West Bank. As the film makes clear, he is devoted to building the institutions, structures, and psychology of a normal state—even as that normalcy is denied his people. The reality of a Palestinian state, he has said, “will impose itself on the world.” His legacy is evident, in concrete, in Ramallah and throughout the West Bank.

The screening of the film last night at the Naval Heritage Center—an event organized by the Brookings Institution and the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk—could not have been better timed, as the documentary’s narrative builds to the Palestinian Authority’s insistence on taking its case to the U.N. after failing to get anywhere with the Israelis in recent years. A hundred and thirty eight countries voted in favor of yesterday’s resolution; forty-one abstained; and nine—including the United States, Israel, Canada, Panama, and mighty Palau—voted against. The vote came on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the U.N. vote that divided British-mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Fayyad called that vote “Israel’s birth certificate.” He went on to say, “We are still waiting for ours.”

Speaking before the screening of the film, it was clear that Fayyad was deeply ambivalent about the U.N. vote.

“There is a great deal of celebrating now all over Palestine and in the Palestinian diaspora,” Fayyad told me. “But it may fizzle out in a week or two. Whether it will or not depends on what we do with it. If we just step back and admire it for too long and let those who are made angry by it take the initiative, well, that is one thing. We have to be careful of that.”

“I am very happy about it today, but I’m realistic,” he continued. “We already have a great many symbols: a Palestinian flag, Palestinian stamps. If you are a Palestinian you cannot help but be excited, but the question is: How can this be leveraged? Our people are looking for a state as free people. We are looking for the real thing, not more symbols.”

The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, is more than aware that his people may be punished for taking the initiative in the United Nations. They could be punished by the Israelis, who threaten to withhold the tax revenues they collect for the Palestinian Authority, and punished by the U.S. Congress, which could also exact financial retribution by halting funding to U.N. agencies that help the Palestinians. There were already such rumblings yesterday in Jerusalem and on Capitol Hill. [Update: By Friday morning, Haaretz reported [3] that the Israeli government had begun the approval process for a settlement expansion into a zone known as “death knell for a two-state solution,” the Times noted [4], because of how it would cut off Palestinians communities as well as three thousand units in East Jerusalem.]

“I hope sanity will prevail,” Fayyad said. “But you don’t know. Sometimes the imperatives of politics force people to be unreasonable and do unreasonable things…. If the Israelis decide to [withhold those tax revenues], that would be crippling.”

On the surface, “State 194” is an optimistic film. Its Israeli director, Dan Setton, worked easily with his Palestinian subject as he moved around the West Bank, meeting with villagers, checking in on construction projects, and attending rallies. Setton is clearly encouraged by Fayyad’s successes, and his capacity to work, politically, in Washington and in European capitals. In the film, we also see young, idealistic Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza coördinating non-violent resistance by Skype and e-mail; we see an Israeli, whose son was killed by Hamas, working for peace and conciliation with his Palestinian neighbors and friends; we see Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street and an American with deep family roots in Israel, working hard in the halls of Congress to push a two-state agenda and to counteract the powerful right-wing influence of AIPAC.

And yet one could only leave that film with a profound sense of unease. Fayyad is undoubtedly a man of decency—a constructive force in every sense of the word—but he has no real political base at home; his base is international far more than it is domestic, something he quietly admits. I noticed that he had an Ace bandage around his right hand and asked him what had happened. He smiled and said he had slammed his hand so hard on a table during a dispute inside the P.A. that he broke a bone. (“At least Khrushchev had the good sense to use his shoe!” he said.) Fayyad opposes violent resistance, talks of allowing settlers to stay behind, in peace, in a Palestinian state if they choose, and does not push the refugee issue. This makes him popular abroad, but he is seen as an accommodationist by many at home.

Fayyad’s extraordinary efforts to build the institutions of a state in the absence of a state are greeted with praise in Israel, but where does it get him, and the Palestinians, politically? Netanyahu, who has made broad rhetorical noises about a two-state settlement, is the most cynical of politicians, prizing his political coalition and survival over any sense of history and justice. Settlements keep expanding and the horizon for a two-state solution keeps receding. Netanyahu’s recent decision to take on his racist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as a practical and ideological partner [5] before the January election sends a clear signal to the Palestinians. At the same time, Netanyahu has stripped his party list of centrists like Dan Meridor, a cabinet member who was once a hardliner on the Palestinians but who came to recognize that the absence of a sane and decent resolution of the Palestinian question was a form of national suicide.

A few scenes in the movie show Israeli liberals at work: young people demonstrating in Sheikh Jarrah against the cruel displacement of Arabs from their houses; a crowd, led by Israeli intellectuals like Amos Oz, demonstrating for a Palestinian state outside the Tel Aviv hall where the State of Israel was declared. Stirring scenes, but what goes unmentioned is how small and isolated these demonstrations are, how far to the right the political spectrum is moving.

“I just saw an ad in the Jerusalem Post,” Fayyad said, and it depressed him. It showed a series of Likud politicians advertising themselves on the basis of just how vigorously they opposed a Palestinian state.

After the screening, I had a longer discussion with Fayyad and he called on President Obama to lay out the American vision for a settlement. He gamely talked up the day’s events at the U.N. He tried to describe how, with negotiations and a true settlement, the P.A. would be able to join forces with, and soften, the political positions of Hamas. He almost seemed to believe it. But while it was an exciting day, it was a day that was ending. “And I am thinking about the morning after,” he said. On the morning after, everything awaited: a right-wing Likud government with excellent prospects of retaining power in elections next month and moving further right; Gaza, still disconnected, physically and politically, from the West Bank, and ruled by Hamas, which gained strength from its recent battle with Israel; and a series of regional dramas, from Egypt to Iran, which, Fayyad admitted, “have put the Palestinians on the back-burner.”

A day that had begun with a serious, if mainly symbolic, triumph, and a film that wanted to instill hope, eventually led to a darker set of conclusions. “It’s obvious,” said Fayyad. “We are running out of time.”