[New York Times] Steven Erlanger - Alam Fayyad, 55, is the non-Hamas prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. In an emergency government - now a caretaker government, after the firing of the one led by Hamas - Mr. Fayyad is both chef and bottle washer: prime minister, finance minister and foreign minister. While leaving peace negotiations to the elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, Mr. Fayyad is a one-stop shop for the West, which is eager to restore the flow of aid it cut off when Hamas took power. He is not a natural politician and lacks charisma. His conviction that armed resistance is counterproductive is not widely shared, certainly not by Hamas, or even by the many gunmen of Fatah. To be the favorite Palestinian of Israel and Washington is not a recipe for popularity either, and it may actually be dangerous. Peace should be pursued, he said, but differently, simultaneously with his effort to build the basics of Palestinian statehood.
2007-08-27 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive