Dialogues from the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival - Salam Fayyad
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad talks with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about Obama, Netanyahu, and how to build a state.
Thomas Friedman: I can say with some authority that I’ve known a lot of the good guys and a lot of the bad guys in the Middle East, and this is one of the really good guys. … Let me ask you this: Does President Barack Obama know something about how to resolve this problem that George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., that others didn’t? Or is his force of personality, his style as manifested by his speech in Cairo—even if we have the same old policies—itself a huge advance?
Salam Fayyad: I think what he has is the benefit of the experience of the past attempts at making peace in the Middle East. I mean, style is always an integral part of the equation, certainly. But the substance of it, I believe, and what I believe is driving it is the benefit of experience of nearly 16 years of trying to do this unsuccessfully. And I say this analytically. And I say this because of what I perceive to be as a matter of very sharp focus on what I call elements of success, rather than just on the grand picture of getting there.
Friedman: So building more from the ground—
Fayyad: Right. … As one of my professors in economics was fond of saying, you need to have potatoes to make potato chips.
Friedman: So what are those potatoes from the Palestinian point of view?
Fayyad: The potatoes from the Palestinian point of view are the institutions capable of delivering good governance to the Palestinian people—the institutions of the Palestinian state in the making: … security, law and order, justice, public finance, economic management, welfare, all of the functions that any responsible state should feel obligated to deliver to its citizens in all spheres of governance. This is about building toward statehood.
Friedman: You’d have the institutions and you’d just need the borders in a sense.
Fayyad: Definitely. … You know, the Americans [and] the international community asked that the roadmap report: They want these reforms, they want the PA to do all of these things. And my message all along to people was: The world wants us to have a good public finance system, but is that against our interest? What’s wrong with that? Let’s do that. I mean, we need to do it.
Ladies and gentlemen, every time we take a step in the direction of having a function
of a state perform competently, … with every step that we take in the direction of institution building, that’s a step closer to our freedom, to our statehood; that’s what it is about. Therefore, that’s what really drives this process. These happen to be our potatoes, so to speak. These happen to be our obligations under the roadmap. The roadmap is about security. It’s about security for Israel; but it’s about security for Palestinians, [too]. It’s about governance. It’s about ensuring the capacity of Palestinian people to govern themselves in all facets and spheres of governance, including security. That’s what this is about. And that’s why we took it upon ourselves—particularly after what happened to us in 2007 with the fall of Gaza to Hamas, with the West Bank being under such a state of complete and utter lawlessness—to actually be serious about state-building, get people to rally around the cores of state-building. You know, if this is about statehood, then let us build toward that.
I do not need anyone to remind me that we’re doing it under occupation. I know that. But we are doing it because we are under occupation, in spite of the occupation, to end it. We [have to] create the state as a fact on the ground in a positive way—in response to adversity, in spite of the adversity, to end the adversity. So that two years from now, … I hope it will not be difficult for anyone to look toward us and come to the conclusion: Indeed the Palestinians do have a state, but for the occupation. … If we do that, we’ll have succeeded. That’s our message. It’s a progressive message, it’s a positive message.
Friedman: Do you feel that in Prime Minister Netanyahu, you have an Israeli prime minister who appreciates that there is a new Palestinian strategy, that it is making headway, and that he can and will contribute to it assuming you deliver on the security side. Do you feel that Netanyahu gets it?
Fayyad: You know, I can only hope so. And I really would hate to think that the politics from either side would continue to drive this process forever in the wrong direction, because a good part of the failure is due to that and is due to time wasted on speculating whether or not there is a partner here or there is a partner there. … Let’s all measure up; let’s all do what we all have to do. And each focus on those requirements—look, the roadmap did not say who begins what first when. It said, You Palestinians have to do this; you Israelis have to do that. A lot of time was wasted on who goes first and who goes second and all of that. And we all paid dearly for it; Israelis and Palestinians alike. … Indeed, the world at large. So I call on Israeli leadership to basically do what has to be done. I call on us to do what we have to do. And what I like about the new paradigm, if it is that and I hope it is, is for us both to be expected to deliver. … The bar has to be raised. We both should act with much greater sense of urgency. We both should feel accountable. Look, we can’t do it alone.