A picture of Mohammad and they riot like mad dogs.
Continuous suicide murder in the name of Islime, and not a peep.
They are all terrorist murder supporters.
Intelligence analyst: Getzel
‘Our Dreams Are Dead’
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Our interview is interrupted by the arrival of Jimmy Carter and his entourage. "He's early," says Fayyad, looking at his watch. Rosalynn Carter, whose memoir I worked on, is startled to see me. "What on earth are you doing here?" she asks as we hug. Fayyad's meeting with Carter is going to last at least an hour, Carter's senior aide says to me apologetically. The meeting with the Palestinian prime minister has become all-important because Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is visiting Washington and the Israeli government has stonewalled Carter because of his intention to meet with the head of Hamas in Syria.
I ask Fayyad when we resume if he is in touch with Hamas in Gaza. "No," he says. "I have no official or unofficial contact with them. However, I talk to the people in Gaza all the time. Here we are. You see? You just made a mistake, unwittingly of course, of using the word 'Hamas' and 'Gaza' interchangeably. That's not the reality. Hamas is in control of Gaza, there's no question about that, but not every Palestinian man, woman and child living and suffering in Gaza is Hamas or under Hamas obligation. This is an odd situation which I hope and pray will not be anything but transitional and will soon be a part of our past."
What about the walls, I ask him, and the checkpoints and the permits and the mood of despair I'd found in the West Bank? "I can definitely tell you it is justified," he says. Is he optimistic that things will change for the better? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm not discouraged," he finally says. "There's a big difference. I'm convinced we're going to get there."
He smiles and tells me a story that he says will illustrate something about his world view. Last week he was in a little village of 300 residents to inaugurate a kindergarten. The minute he stepped out of the car someone stuck a microphone in his face and said, "What about the walls?" "I said, 'Look at all the olive trees around you. The youngest tree is older than the wall.' And the mere fact that this event was about children and the future was the most positive of ironies. [It] was the most positive day of my life as prime minister—notwithstanding the miserable context in which all this is taking place."
Linda Bird Francke is a frequent traveler to the Middle East and is a former editor at NEWSWEEK.
© 2008
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