‘Our Dreams Are Dead’

There are many sympathetic Israeli groups that document the treatment of the Palestinian people. Yesh Din, for example, monitors the trials of West Bank Palestinians in military courts and recently released a scathing report: 99 percent of defendants in 2006 were found guilty, many after hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Another group, Machsom Watch, which is made up of accomplished Israeli women, videotapes the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints. Their latest complaint, filed while I was there, involved 46 Palestinians looking for work being held for 16 hours at a checkpoint. The Palestinians were allowed no food or toilet facilities and were forced to stand for hours on end. "When they sit down they make trouble," the report quoted a member of the IDF saying. At some point during their detention, the tires of their vans were punctured and some of their cars were vandalized.

Prime Minister Fayyad wears heavily the burdens on his people. He looks tired when we meet in his modest office in Ramallah, but he perks up when he tells me about his children. His oldest son is at his American alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, where Fayyad earned his doctorate in economics. His daughter has just received early admission to MIT; his youngest is still in grade school in Jerusalem. Like my friend Karim, Salam Fayyad accepted his post, first as finance minister and then as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, out of a sense of duty. "It was natural and instinctive," he says. "I thought it was important to be in a position to contribute."

Fayyad lays out clearly the Palestinian position. "The objective of this enterprise is to end the occupation and have an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state emerge on the land that was occupied in 1967," he says. "For us Palestinians to get a chance to live as free people in a state of our own, in peace and harmony with all of our neighbors, including Israel." That, of course, is what everyone wants. But how to get there?

Though he doesn't criticize the Israeli government, Fayyad methodically lists the impediments to the peace process. Foremost is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in direct contravention of every peace initiative since 1967, including the current "road map" to peace laid out by the Quartet—the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia—in 2002. "Not one more brick!" Fayyad says emphatically. "It's a road map obligation. It means not one more block, no exceptions, no nothing. And that's not what is happening." In the five-week period following the re-ignition of the peace process in Annapolis in the fall of 2007, he points out, the Israelis added 747 new units to the settlements, which in fact are cities, commanding the tops of hills the length of the West Bank. "If this keeps on happening, clearly the viability of the solution keeps on eroding," he says. "This is logical."

Israel's "security behavior" in the occupied territories is also a deterrent. Fayyad is proud that the Palestinian Authority police force has been effective in bringing about "conditions of law and order after years of complete lawlessness and chaos. It is one of the things we have focused on." But the ongoing raids by the Israeli Army into urban areas "where we have our own troops," he says, undermines the PA's authority and credibility. "It's happening in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, everywhere," he says. "This has to change." So, he says, do the travel restrictions on Palestinians. "We cannot go on like this," he says. "You cannot have economic development under conditions of lack of mobility. The only way you can keep an economy like this afloat is by continuing to inject official assistance into the system, and that's not our vision for Palestine. We do not want to be a beggar nation."

On the Palestinian side, a major setback to statehood, Fayyad readily admits, are the militias. "To tell you the truth," he says, "were it not for the chaos of weapons for the militias roaming around, with everyone doing what they want wherever they want to do it, the political differences would not have translated into the bloodshed we experience." Weapons should be the "sure purview" of the state, he says, and the "key goal" of his government is to try to "import this concept."