Word: fayyad
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...West Bank GDP grew at around 8% in 2009, although that was an improvement on practically no economic activity at all. "We started from utter lawlessness, virtual disintegration in 2007," says Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister - an economist who graduated from the University of Texas and spent much of his career at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Palestinian Authority had been sundered by the Hamas coup in Gaza; Fayyad - a technocrat's technocrat - freely admits that governance in the West Bank had long been marked by corruption and ineptitude. "The only way to gain Palestinian statehood...
...hands of criminal gangs and radical militias. With the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, the Palestinians trained five brigades (2,500 troops) of a new national-security force - with two more in the pipeline - and began training local police. "We started with Nablus, the most lawless city," says Fayyad. "Our policy was zero tolerance. Anyone who committed a crime was an outlaw, regardless of party affiliation." It seems to have worked. Nell Derick Debevoise, an American woman who works with an excellent pre- and after-school program in Nablus called Tomorrow's Youth, told me, "When I first...
Security, Fayyad assumed, was one prerequisite of economic development. Another was transparent governance. "We're firing incompetents and thieves in the government. You can't be taken seriously unless you fire people," Fayyad says. As a result, "we're beginning to see some economic growth. Cement consumption is up 30%." Part of the growth has been funded by aid from the U.S., Europe and the Islamic world, which helps pay the salaries of government workers and funds new infrastructure projects. In 2008, Fayyad held a conference in Bethlehem, looking to begin the next phase - private development - and got some takers...
...many Palestinians into the diaspora as they can. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent decision to declare sites in the Arab cities of Hebron and Bethlehem Jewish historical landmarks seemed a provocation intended to cause the sort of mass violence that has destroyed the hopes of responsible Palestinians in the past. Fayyad's progress is as fragile as plate glass; the next rock thrown could shatter it. (See TIME's photo-essay "Life in the West Bank Settlements...
That is a very good question. Abbas and Fayyad plan to have all the components of a functioning Palestinian state in place in the West Bank by the summer of 2011. At that point, a different question arises - not just for Israel but for the U.S.: What obstacles are there to recognizing a legitimate state of Palestine? What excuses do we have left...