Fayyad's Road to Palestine

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — I spoke to the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, for 90 minutes, and the word he uttered most often, by far, was “security.” As in, “The absence of security has been our undoing.”

"That mission is a two-year program, begun last August, to ready Palestine for statehood by the second half of 2011. It represents a break with past Palestinian failure in that it espouses nonviolence — “an ironclad commitment, not a seasonal thing,” he said — and is focused on prosaic stuff like building institutions (police, schools, a justice system, roads and an economy) rather than exalted proclamations"

A better approach than we have seen.

I await developments.

Odds on survival are not great.