Building the Palestinian State With Salam Fayyad

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“If only we had a partner for peace.” That’s been the refrain in the Israel-Palestinian conflict for as long as I’ve followed it. But the truth is you don’t need just a partner — you need two partners able to deliver at the same time. So you could see it as a tragedy of history that Salam Fayyad joined the Palestinian Authority in 2002, at the height of the second intifada, just as Israeli society shifted hard to the right. A Western-educated economist, Fayyad is a technocrat at heart. And as the Palestinian Authority’s finance minister, and then as prime minister, he dedicated himself to the spadework of state-building. His theory was that instead of waiting around for the peace process to deliver Palestinian statehood, he would just build a state — institutions, infrastructure, security, sewers and all — and then statehood would follow. And by many measures, he was remarkably successful. The economy boomed, crime plummeted, and in 2011 the United Nations declared the authority ready to run an independent state. But in April 2013, Fayyad resigned. And today, the Palestinian Authority in tatters, widely seen by Palestinians as corrupt and a failure. Fayyad is now a visiting senior scholar at Princeton. And I wanted to have him on the show to talk about his time building a Palestinian state. What did he learn working with the various factions — including Hamas — in Palestinian politics? What did he learn working with Israel? How did we still end up here? And what, given all he’s seen and done, does he think should happen now? Mentioned: Into the Breach: Salam Fayyad and Palestine “A Plan for Peace in Gaza” by Salam Fayyad Book Recommendations: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson The Arabs by Eugene Rogan On The Trails of Mariam by Nadia Harhash Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. If we'd only had a partner for peace, that's been the refrain in the Israeli-Palestinian
0:28.4	conflict for as long as I've followed it.
0:30.1	You hear it often from Israelis, you also sometimes hear it from Palestinians.
0:35.0	And there's truth to this, but there's also a bit of a lie to it because it suggests you only need one partner.
0:42.0	What you need is two partners able to It suggests you only need one partner.
0:42.8	What you need is two partners able to deliver
0:46.1	at the same time.
0:48.4	There's this moment in Palestinian political history
0:51.0	that keeps coming up for me in my reading and my thinking.
0:54.4	So it's 2009.
0:56.2	Abbas is as he is now the president of the Palestinian Authority, and a man named
1:00.6	Salam Fayyad is the Prime Minister.
1:03.2	And Fayyad has an interesting history.
1:05.1	He has an economics PhD from the United States.
1:07.4	He's worked at the World Bank and the IMF.
1:09.4	He's brought in by Arafat in 2002, the height of the second intifada, to serve as finance minister and to build the basic
1:15.9	capabilities of a Palestinian state.
1:18.9	He became Prime Minister in 2007 after the breakup of the unity government between Hamas and Fatah.
1:25.7	And he is at his core a kind of technocrat, a person who focuses on the nuts and bolts of governance.
1:32.2	So in 2009, frustrated by seeing peace deal
1:34.8	after peace deal fall apart, he begins moving forward with an idea that reverses the
1:38.9	way people had been thinking about this. Maybe the way to a state is not through some grand deal, bargain, settlement,
	...

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