The current leadership of Fatah and the PA is taking no chances, having issued a veiled threat to Marwan Barghouti, languishing in an Israeli prison since 2002 but still active in the movement from his cell. And a few days ago, Fatah expelled former leader Yasser Arafat’s nephew, Nasser al-Qudwa, from the movement over his electoral challenge to President Mahmoud Abbas.
But those intent on saving the PA from Abbas, whether through internal Fatah rivals or through “independent” technocratic personalities, are not to be outdone; they have just unleashed their latest electoral candidate, former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who recently announced in an interview with the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds that he is returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to run for elections as an independent.
National unity government
Fayyad declared that the parliamentary bloc he intends to form would consist of “independent personalities” and that they would conduct their campaign with “transparency and honour”. He added that the elections should establish a government of national unity that includes everyone, “and not a majority government”. Still, he expressed concerns about the achievement of such unity through elections, given the divisions among Palestinian factions, especially Fatah and Hamas, and the crackdown by the ruling Fatah-PA on freedom of expression.
Fayyad, who served as PA prime minister after the Fatah coup against Hamas in 2007 until 2013, is currently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He departed from the Palestinian scene after dabbling in an NGO whose funds were sequestered in 2015 by a PA court, which accused the organisation of using its funds for political, not philanthropic, aims – a charge Fayyad denied.
Some in the corridors of Israeli, Arab and western power seem to be doing everything they can to end all forms of Palestinian resistance once and for all
Fayyad’s curriculum vitae includes working for the International Monetary Fund from 1987 to 2001, where the latter half of his tenure included serving as resident representative in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2002, he became the PA’s finance minister.
While serving as prime minister in 2009, Fayyad – dubbed by Israel’s late President Shimon Peres as “the Palestinians’ first Ben-Gurionist”- predicted that a Palestinian state would be established by 2011. More than a decade since his unfulfilled prediction, he seems to have reneged on his own hope and, if his recent declarations are to be believed, changed course radically.
During his long stint as prime minister, he recognised Israel as a “biblical country”, noting: “Related to the Zionist ethos, fine, Israel is a biblical country, there are lots of hilltops, lots of vacant space, why don’t [the settlers] use that, and let us get on with it?” But in his recent interview, he insisted that Palestinians should now claim their national rights in all of “historic Palestine”.