The Palestinian Paradox

HATEM MOUSSA/AP
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and his supporters in Gaza, May 1

When I interviewed Salam Fayyad in Ramallah at the end of February, he was a worried man--and with reason. In June 2007 Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Fatah movement and the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, had installed Fayyad as the PA's "emergency" prime minister. That was right after the clashes in which US-trained Fatah forces were thrown out of the Gaza Strip by security forces loyal to elected Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.

Abbas hoped that the marriage of Fayyad's widely publicized managerial skills with large amounts of US and US-encouraged funding--$1.8 billion delivered in 2007, for the West Bank's population of just 2.5 million--would enable the Fatah-controlled West Bank to flourish. Palestinian voters in Gaza, squeezed tight by the illegal blockade Israel had imposed following the 2006 election there, would then renounce the preference for Hamas they had displayed in the elections and restore Fatah to power.

But it did not work out. Opinion polls conducted in late January--shortly after the end of Israel's devastating twenty-two-day assault on Gaza--found Hamas more popular than Fatah. Indeed, Hamas was more popular in the West Bank than it was in war-shattered Gaza. No wonder Fayyad was gloomy. He greeted me by saying, in the economist-speak that is his preferred jargon, "Things are, as always, getting incrementally worse. But now the increments are getting bigger." Two weeks later he tendered his resignation.

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