United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s sweet compliments for Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were the breaking point for PA leaders who forced him to resign, contends TIME magazine.
The new Secretary of State, wife of Oslo Accords sponsor and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, poured on the praise of Fayyad during her visit to Ramallah last week, upsetting the Fatah establishment as well as Hamas. They consider him an outsider, and he never enjoyed their support since the Bush administration handpicked him as “their man” in the PA two years ago.
Clinton’s lavish applause for Fayyad, who has spent most of his adult life in the U.S., was a continuation of a U.S. policy of trying to westernize the PA and build up confidence for moderate leaders who want to create a new Arab state in all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza through international pressure on Israel instead of through terrorism.
The American government and several media analysts tried to present Fayyad’s resignation as paving the way for a new Hamas-unity government that would allow Fatah to resume control over Gaza and moderate Hamas.
However, TIME’s Tim McGirk reported, “The Prime Minister's pat on the head from Clinton was the snapping point for many senior Fatah officials, who resent Fayyad as a technocratic usurper with no political base of his own.”
Fayyad, an economist, vowed to wipe out corruption in the Fatah-led government, and he was a welcome partner with the U.S. for its program to train Fatah armed forces to bring law and order to the Arab street and keep out terrorists. He was being groomed by the U.S. to replace PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, according to several media sources.
“Whether or not those specific reports are true, most Palestinians resent what they see as U.S. meddling in their internal politics,” McGirk wrote. “The previous Administration had first demanded that the Palestinians hold democratic elections, and then when those elections were won by Hamas, Washington refused to accept the result.”
The State Department has been pleased with Hamas’s continuing decline in popularity, but that has changed around dramatically in the past several weeks. A poll released last week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) reported that Hamas’s return to popularity is partly the result of Abbas’s relative silence during Operation Cast Lead and “public perceptions of the end of Abbas’s term in office and hence the loss of legitimacy suffered by the Fayyad’s government.”
The survey showed that if elections were held today, Gaza de facto Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh would defeat Abbas. PA Arabs are running out of patience with the lack of progress towards ousting Israel from Judea and Samaria and making eastern Jerusalem the capital of a new Arab country.
Hamas also declared victory and won Arab admiration at the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that left the Hamas terrorist authority intact.