Nathan Brown at the Carengie Endowment for International peace wonders if faith in Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, isn’t oversold.
Brown has toured the West Bank, and says that in some ways, accountability has regressed since the days of Yasser Arafat:
To the extent that Fayyadism is building institutions, it is unmistakably doing so in an authoritarian context. There is no reason to associate Fayyad personally with the most egregious aspects of this new authoritarianism, but there is no way his cabinet could have been created or sustained in a more democratic environment.
For an example of the most recent Fayyad hype, here’s Tom Friedman in the New York Times.
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