Opinion | Building the Palestinian State With Salam Fayyad

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

“If we’d only had a partner for peace” That’s been the refrain in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for as long as I’ve followed it. You hear it often from Israelis. You also sometimes hear it from Palestinians.

And there’s truth to this. But there’s also a bit of a lie to it, because it suggests you only need one partner. What you need is two partners, able to deliver at the same time.

There’s this moment in Palestinian political history that keeps coming up for me in my reading and my thinking. So it’s 2009. Abbas is, as he is now, the president of the Palestinian Authority. And a man named Salam Fayyad is the prime minister.

And Fayyad has an interesting history. He has an economics Ph.D. from the United States. He’s worked at the World Bank and the I.M.F. He’s brought in by Arafat in 2002, the height of the second intifada, to serve as finance minister and to build the basic capabilities of a Palestinian state. He became prime minister in 2007 after the breakup of the unity government between Hamas and Fatah. And he is, at his core, a kind of technocrat, a person who focuses on the nuts and bolts of governance.

So in 2009, frustrated by seeing peace deal after peace deal fall apart, he begins moving forward with an idea that reverses the way people had been thinking about this: Maybe the way to a state is not through some grand deal, bargain, settlement, declaration. Maybe it is through the internal development of a state. Maybe it is through the simple building of the state itself. Show you can collect taxes. Show you can maintain internal security. Show you can work with your partners. And then, maybe the world will have no choice but to recognize that state.

Maybe Israelis will see they can work with you. And if they don’t, or if they don’t want to work with you, maybe the fact that you have built this will lead the international community to demand they work with you. And so Fayyad goes about doing this. And to a very large extent, a remarkable extent, he succeeds, and that success is noticed.

A month after Obama gave that speech — this is now April of 2013 — Fayyad resigns as prime minister. And today, the Palestinian Authority he worked so hard to build into a governing force is in tatters. It is unpopular. It is widely considered to be corrupt. It is widely considered among Palestinians to have failed — failed to deliver the better lives they need, failed to deliver the state they had been promised. So what happened? Why didn’t this work?

Fayyad is now at Princeton, and his name is being floated as one of the people who might be called back in some kind of revitalized Palestinian government. But I wanted to know what happened when he tried this the first time. What went right, and what went wrong, what he learned working with the other factions and forces in Palestinian politics and working with Israel — and how he still ended up here. As always, my email — ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Salam Fayyad, welcome to the show.

Pleasure to be with you.

It’s an honor to have you here. So in 2009, you are prime minister. You release a plan to establish a Palestinian state within two years.

Yes.

Tell me about the theory of that plan.

The rationale behind launching that plan, which actually ended up being launched in August of 2009, was to make explicit, in the most constructive of ways possible, that we Palestinians were tired of a political process that failed to deliver. So it was important for us to somehow find a way to say, we’re tired of this occupation. This can’t go on forever.

In many ways, the content of the plan actually represented a continuation of things that we were doing before. When I first joined the P.A. as finance minister in mid-2002, the height of the second intifada, I had this idea about the need to build the Palestinian Authority from the ground up. And finance is an important component of that and was considered to be a significant enough step in the direction of rehabilitating the Palestinian Authority. It’s kind of really ironic, when it was supposed to have ceased to exist anyway.

The other background to this, actually, is important. Going back to June 2002, when George W. Bush was president, he made a very important policy statement on the question of Palestine-Israel, which he said — and he was the first sitting U.S. president to say that — yes, Palestinian state, but then Palestinians have to meet these requirements.

Which, on the face of things to me, like, did not sound fair. Because here we are, singled out for having somehow to prove that we are worthy enough to exercise something which is a natural right for all peoples around the world — i.e. right to self-determination. My attitude toward this was, fair or unfair, let’s take that test and pass it. We did better than that. Actually, we wrote the exam in the form of that plan. We said, this is what we intend to do over the span of the next two years in order for us to cross the threshold of readiness for statehood, beginning with a vision, overarching vision, for what that Palestine was going to look like, for it to really actually be a state that is founded on foundations, progressive values of openness, tolerance, inclusivity, pluralism, democracy, and all of that. And the question we try to answer was, what should be done in various sectors of governance over a period of two years in order for us to be in a position to fulfill that overarching national vision?

When I read your story, when I read your policy memoir, what I see is the difficulty of trying to form what we think of as a state — a taxation authority, sewers, et cetera — out of the clay of a group that was not built to do that, was built not to govern anything, but to assert the rights of a people, to fight for that people.

And so the people who were leaders in it — they had the experience of war. They had the experience of being refugees. They had experience of planning military operations. But they didn’t have the experience of managing sewer construction.

So tell me a bit about — when you began working with the Palestinian Authority, or what becomes a Palestinian Authority, who were the people in it, and what kind of experience did they bring to that?

Remember, it was the P.L.O., the Palestine Liberation Organization, that entered into the Oslo Accords with the state of Israel back in 1993. The P.L.O., acting on behalf of all Palestinians, actually signed those Accords. And those Accords gave rise to this self-governing entity called the Palestinian Authority.

It was supposed to govern and take care of the needs of the Palestinian people and the territories Israel occupied in 1967 — West Bank and Gaza — for an interim period that was to end in May 1999. This was supposed to be a transitional period of five years. And if your thinking is, in five years, we’re going to have a state, you’re preoccupied with that.

So it should not come as a surprise that the Palestinian leadership, in the ‘90s, was preoccupied with political process, lost in the detail. The building is part — the building component — so that’s what got lost in the shuffle. It doesn’t mean, in fairness to our own history, that nothing was done.

There was a lot of investment on the part of the international community in helping the Palestinian Authority put together the institutions of a functional state. And in terms of the makeup, yes, ministries, agencies, and all were, by and large, staffed by people who came into Palestine with President Arafat after a long period in Tunisia. Some had some experience what they were doing, but others didn’t.

So some progress was made. I’m not really saying nothing happened. But it was not the — it was not the main game in town. The focus was on peace envoy coming, peace envoy coming back. What’s going to happen? Next donor meeting. Then, of course, Camp David and the run-up to it, and all of that happened in between.

And so I just want to pull something out that you’re saying, because this also tracks my understanding of it, but I think this is important — that the theory of the P.L.O., the P.A., of Arafat in this period — I would call it an external theory — that they are going to get statehood by negotiating with the Americans, the Israelis, the Egyptians, the Europeans, et cetera.

There’s a lot of focus on that external game. And at the same time, they have to manage internally. They have constituents. They have people who need the roads to be fixed. They have to figure out how the ministries work.

But the theory is that they’re going to get to the promised land through a deal, and those deals then begin to fall apart. People who want more background on this can listen to our episode with Aaron David Miller. And so I want to fast forward here a little bit to 2002. This is the Second Intifada.

Yes.

There is a lot of violence. There are Israeli sieges of parts of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is now a player. There are suicide bombings coming from multiple groups into Israel.

And you’re brought in by Arafat as finance minister. Tell me why. Why does he choose you to be finance minister?

Oh, OK. People were beginning to express unhappiness about the way governance issues were handled. Even from my days, with the I.M.F. in the ‘90s — I’m talking about ‘97, ‘98 — stories about, not all money that the P.A. made came to the coffers of minister of finance, commercial operations, investment operations taking place outside the purview of minister of finance — so people were beginning to say something about it.

And we did have a good legislative council. There was a lot of discussion in the legislature about these issues. In spring of 2002, before I joined the P.A., there was an important session of the PLC, as it is called — the Palestinian Legislative Council, which, basically, they came up with a list of demands and expectations of the leadership. Things needed to change.

So it was against that backdrop, and also international calls for reform, that I was called in to serve as finance minister. And the president called me and asked me if I would do this. And I said, yes, and I did it.

And so from the way you tell this, what you have here is now internal and external pressure in the same direction. This is after the second intifada launches —

Correct.

— after Camp David fails. This is a cratering of Arafat’s international standing.

Yes.

I mean, the Americans are furious. The Europeans are upset. People are feeling hopeless about this now. There’s much more violence. Israeli politics is moving to the right. There’s a feeling that the P.A. is corrupt. And internally, you’re saying, there’s also this pressure from the legislative council, kind of also saying, there’s no deal coming, and the state isn’t working. The government isn’t working.

So you come in. This is about as bad as things have been to that point. And you begin a project of working on internal bureaucratic processes. It seems — and I’ve read your account of this — it seems very incongruous, right? To imagine somebody — at the same time there’s military curfews and sieges and suicide bombings — sitting around, trying to figure out the accounting structure and how people bring a request for money from one office to another.

But tell me a bit about that work and why you decided to focus on that first, why you decided to focus on process.

It was my job, my job. I was brought in to really actually put Palestinian finances in order. And details matter in this. And you know, to me, as I said, the task was always about building the state and projecting its reality on the ground.

In finances, it had to mean preparing budget. It had to mean having your accounts right, and it had to meet transparency. It had to mean all of those things. It’s a critical component of being a transparent government, to be transparent in your own finances.

And my focus at the time was on getting it fixed, going forward. Key challenge also at the time — you asked me about what it felt like — I remember what it was like. It was basically not being able to go to my office. Ramallah itself was under curfew for a good period of time.

When you are in government, and especially acting under highly challenging conditions of the kind that we were having to contend with, you can’t basically say, we’re closed for business until we’re fixed. You got to fix it on the go, so to speak.

So it was those little things. Whenever you can do something, however little, just do it. You can’t just wait for the perfect alignment of stars. That was the doctrine, if you will.

And then, building on whatever confidence that you can get and generate or doing things to do more things incrementally, in a way that was highly opportunistic. And I say this in the best possible sense of the word. Do what you can as soon as you can do it. And that basically is how we went about doing business.

How were things working? I mean, I’ve heard it describe function as a patronage model, that people go to Arafat, make an ask for money, and the point of the finance ministry was to try to back up the things that Arafat said he would — like, what was going on before you came in, and then what is the way in which you changed it?

You described it right — patronage. And it was the way Palestinian leadership managed even before coming to Palestine. Money, basically, was distributed from the center, and decisions on disbursement had to be made by the president himself, big or small.

So when I came in, it was just like that, pretty much. But who hires, for example? President had to approve everything. Sometimes it actually took the form of a number of people.

Like, we need 100 or 200 people in security. Somebody would write a memo to the president, saying — and there would be a list of names, and the president say, approved. Something like that.

So what do you do? So you have a president, larger than life, iconic leader. And I did have a very good working relationship with him, really, and he trusted me. He had really good confidence in what I was trying to do.

So how do you change the system from patronage to a systems-based approach to running affairs of government? So basically, what you thought was sensible worked. And you really needed to lobby with some colleagues here and there, but you got it done.

For example, if the president had signed off on a piece of paper for somebody to get health care, I would send it to the Minister of Health for review. And I would charge it to the budget of the Minister of Health as opposed to the budget of the President’s Office. And if it’s social welfare, I would send it to the Minister of Social Affairs. Just allow the flow to continue. But it started to really compartmentalize it and organize it institutionally.

Next budget that we did, we actually had all of those anticipated expenditures integrated in the budgets of line ministers. So that’s when you really begin to see — and I cannot tell you the extent to which this was absolutely fascinating and highly motivating and a source of joy, to see what once was so centralized and had to really have the president’s approval to happen, all of a sudden, becoming the purview of ministers, line ministers, and agencies.

And you could see the structures appear, beginning to emerge. It happened over time, not overnight. But it did happen. And as I said, within the span of a couple of years, not only did we have a budget that was published, we had good accountability to the legislature, testimonies, hearings, discussions and approvals and the rest of it. We’re beginning to look like a state in the making.

And it sounds like one thing that was crucial to this was the marriage of your processes to Arafat’s authority.

Yes.

Right? That he had the charismatic authority of it. He backed you up. You had the processes. And it was that marriage of the nationalism and the technocratic method that was responsible for at least the success in this period.

Yeah, and it worked. Not everything I did was really easy to swallow, but to his credit, he really actually accepted it. He knew it was about doing the right thing.

Some issues were easier to implement than others, but it was done, to his credit. Most, if not all, of the key components of a well-functioning public finance system were put in place while President Arafat was alive and president of Palestinian Authority. So that’s an example of how you could do things.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So what comes next in ‘06 are elections, and you form another party. It’s called Third Way. The party does not do very well in the polls, but tell me about that decision to form a third party.

Running for office was not something I really had thought about. By spring of 2005, I started to think about wanting to leave government and do something else with my life. But I didn’t want to rock the boat doing it.

So there was talk about elections. And according to our law, you can’t be a cabinet officer and run for office. So for convenience, political convenience, I remember, I was asked by the prime minister at the time — late Abu Alaa, Ahmed Qurei — and the president himself, President Abbas, asked, why are you leaving? I said, I want to run for office. And they both gave me this look — do what? Run for office? I said, what’s wrong with that? It’s like, fine. But then, in the way things happened, it started out as a way out — a quiet way out, if you will — became a reality. And people thought —

For you, it began more as an excuse.

Yeah, I kind of used it, to be honest with you. That was my intention.

Like when you’re quitting a job, but you need an excuse for why you’re quitting the job.

It raised a lot of questions. And I felt it convenient to say I’m running for office. But then it started this way, kind of in a light way. And our system was a mixed system, in the sense that you could run all by yourself, like for individual seats, or you can run on a slate.

So because I really had not given the matter that much thought, originally, I was thinking of running for an office in my own district. But then, talking to some people — and well, why don’t you run on a slate? I was an independent, and I still am — actual political independent.

And so we ran a slate of independents at the time, out of nothing. I mean, just like scratch. It was not a party as you described it. It was just an electoral slate. You need to put together a slate to run for office, and that’s what we did.

And you all come in fairly low. I think it was 2 percent in the polls, if I remember the —

Yes.

And the surprising thing that happens in this election, and that sets the stage for a lot of what comes next, is Hamas does very well.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Why?

Yeah. Look at their election slogans, things that they chose to run on. I think the one that really was most effective is the poster that they run everywhere. It said, America says no to Hamas. Israel says no to Hamas. What do you say?

I’ve heard the slogan before.

And that —

But that tells you a lot about internal Palestinian politics.

Yeah, of course it does. Of course it does. But here we are. This is January 2006 now. And by then, those who still believe that the solution culminating the Palestinian statehood were beginning to become a minority.

What do you do? You play to that. I mean, it’s a failed bet that the P.L.O. made on Oslo, expecting it to deliver Palestinian statehood. And by that time, in the minds of many, and coming on the heels of the Second Intifada and the violence of it all, and the destruction, and both in Gaza and West Bank, basically, that was a winning hand.

Also they ran on, we’re clean. We don’t have issues of corruption. We have white hands. We’re clean and all. So these are really all important messages, I think, electorally speaking.

But technically speaking, mechanics of winning the elections helped them enormously. Because they got about 44 percent of the vote, and Fatah, I think, came in second, at about 43 percent. That would not have given them an outright majority in the way they did — 74 out of 132.

How did that happen? It happened because the election system at the time was like 50 percent proportional — you have to run on a slate — and 50 percent individual seats. People compete in districts.

What Fatah did at the time — because of their own internal politics, they did not have the discipline of running one candidate per position. So they ran against each other, essentially. They took votes from each other, and the Hamas candidates won.

44 percent is a substantial showing — there’s no question about that — but would not have been enough to give them outright majority. What gave them outright majority was the election system.

But one thing you can imagine here — I mean, it is, to some degree, parliamentary. You could imagine coalitional governance. You could have imagined some kind of unity governance.

Yes.

I mean, this is still a people under siege, still trying to fight for statehood. And what you get instead is a violent split.

Yes.

Why? What leads to the crackup of Palestinian governance?

You know, it’s kind of really when you reflect on those days and what you’re trying to do to act as if we’re kind of a mature state and democracy and all. These are really fond memories. It’s like, so Hamas wins, and what Hamas does, actually, is begin the process by consulting with other factions when they, in fact, could have formed the government by themselves.

I mean, they won an outright majority. So they did that. They went through a process of talking to factions, including talking to me. They ended up, without really getting into details, forming, essentially, a Hamas-only government.

And that first year was difficult. There were some clashes and security issues and deterioration and overall lack of stability — strikes and what have you, financial boycott on banking institutions, and the rest of it. Money withheld by government of Israel, so government unable to really meet its salaries, et cetera.

So there was a process of reconciliation, led at the time by Saudi Arabia. And a deal was reached in Mecca, and my name was in that agreement, when I was finance minister. And when I left, I left not to come back, by the way.

But then, the national government was formed, and when my name was mentioned in the agreement.

So you have that, and of course, I joined as finance minister. I was there. I mean, the early going of this was good. It felt good to really be on a cabinet that was inclusive, headed at the time by Hamas. Prime minister was Hamas, and nine or 10 cabinet officers were from Hamas.

We knew each other. I mean, it’s not like some of us were imported from outer space. And it lasted about three months or so — didn’t last so long. And then, we had the violent takeover of power by Hamas in Gaza in June of 2007.

What leads to the dissolution? Why doesn’t that survive?

You know, I always had this premonition about Gaza, separated from the rest of polity. And this goes back to way before Hamas came into power, I have to tell you. I made a point of attending most cabinet meetings from Gaza. Just go there, just make it really stick.

Still, up until that time, it wasn’t really on anybody’s mind that Gaza was going to really separate in the way it happened. And here, it really depends. The story depends on whom you’re talking to. And some say it’s a siege. Financial siege continue to put pressure on the authority, and that kind of led to the implosion and all of that. I personally don’t think that is the case. Because about five or six weeks into my tenure in that very short-lived government, I was able to work with significant components of the international community to find work around the siege on our banking system. And I know what I’m really talking about. I was party to it, and we did it.

So in terms of our capacity to deal with the banking system, that was restored. When I showed up in my second stint as minister of finance, I mean, the P.A. was, again, dealing in cash. There were really invoices, boxes of things. Banking system could not be used, for fear that they’d be kind of banned, internationally and all of it.

So you needed to rebuild the system from scratch. And you can’t do it without having a banking relationship. We were able to restore that. So I don’t buy —

So what do you buy?

What I buy is faction rivalries, for sure. I mean, in politics, you have competition. You need to have competition. For any vibrant democracy, that’s fine.

But then, when the rivalry becomes too much about factional salvation, as opposed to what’s collectively nationally sensible, we all lose. And our struggle for freedom, for nationhood, for self-determination in history cannot really be adequately understood without seeing, at least a good part of it, through the prism of trying to answer the question — who represents the Palestinian people?

If you really factor this into the analysis, you see a lot that you would not otherwise see. I think that was absolutely devastating. There’s no question about that.

It is my opinion that unless we really find a way to not eliminate that pluralism but to manage it effectively, that we really can move forward. Because until we do that, the focus will always be on the privilege of representation, not on what comes with it by way of responsibility.

This feels to me like a place your thinking has changed over time. To fast-forward a little bit here, there’s the breakup of this unity government. There’s violent clashes. Abbas makes you prime minister.

And as prime minister, you, among other things, are managing security. And one thing you’re managing there is basically the expulsion of Hamas in the West Bank.

And I think there’s a vision that people external to Palestinian politics have, which is, you can have some kind of future Palestinian politics with no Hamas, right? That Israel says it will destroy Hamas. My sense is that you’ve come to the view that that is impossible and counterproductive. So tell me a little bit about that evolution in your thinking.

Yeah. As a matter of fact, I was for pluralism and for the arrangement that took place in 2007. And my joining it actually is prima facie evidence of my strong preference for it, even though I knew — and I do not know if I really can go into too much detail here — that this was a government that was going to be rejected internationally and not —

I mean, Israel, of course, we knew. But not only by the United States but also by Europe. So I knew that. I mean, I knew, even if there was this international opposition to it — I’m not talking about Israel —

Which is always a slightly odd thing, given that we pushed very hard for these elections.

Yeah.

The United States pushed for the elections, also pushed to allow Hamas to run in the elections. That was part of George W. Bush’s view, against the advice of other people. Then, Hamas wins. It seems strange to me that the international community both wanted the elections, allowed Hamas to win and then treated it then as delegitimizing for — like, either do it or don’t do it.

I would not really want to get into U.S. position on this and where the president was or wasn’t. But I can tell you that on the principle that you have just articulated right now, there can be no disagreement. And that was my view at the time — that the idea that we have elections but we exclude a faction that, by that time, everybody knew had significant weight politically in the system — I mean, you either have open, fair, inclusive elections, or just governed by fiat.

I mean, it doesn’t really make much sense. It’s a show. I’m not really a fan of pseudo elections — I mean, where you have people go, and they have ink, and they show their finger, and we have voted, but rigged elections.

Now, 2007 — that’s an important moment. I was in this government. And all of a sudden, overnight, essentially, there was this violent takeover of power. I mean, it was there, immediately.

I mean, the president actually was, at the time, of a state of mind that maybe we really cannot save ourselves. I mean, that was predominantly the mood in mid-June 2007. I was in a different place. But I thought it was going to be temporary.

Yes, I was called in to serve as prime minister at the time. And that was the consensus amongst the P.L.O. factions. It’s not something I looked for, or particularly wanted to do or anything like that.

We just sat in a room, and I remember the president at the time, on the day after, asked people to answer three questions. Like, what kind of government do you want us to have — small or normal size — whether it’s factional or non-factional, and who should be the prime minister. And I remember, overwhelmingly, people around — in the way they answered, they put my name on it. So I called a national emergency.

However, I took it literally to mean an emergency government, which under our constitution, which I took seriously and I still do take very seriously, that this was going to be short-lived — that during these short weeks, a way will be found to put the system back together. I was wrong. But actually, on the 29th day of my tenure as prime minister, I submitted my resignation.

This is not reported on a lot, but this is a fact. And this came as a surprise to everybody around me, including the presidents. Like, why are you doing this? And I said, well, that’s the law.

What was your relationship in these years like with Abbas?

It was cordial and all right. I mean, when I left the government, I left as finance minister. He tried to talk me out of it. But I said, I’m running, and I ran.

And then, my own sense is that I’ve gone not to return, I mean, when I left as finance minister. But going back to that period, he was the one who asked me to do this. He knew I’m kind of an independent person and things were not going to really be easy.

But at the time, nobody thought anything was going to be easy. So what do we do? What we do is, if you want me to continue to serve, I resign.

Then, you task me with forming another government. And then, in accordance with the law, I have to take it to the council for vote confidence. Either they voted in or out, but that’s the process.

And we did that. And he called the council to convene to vote on the government. And Hamas did not show up. They would have voted it out that day if they showed up. They didn’t.

There was a session that was supposed to take place. My office was not very far from where the legislature was. And I had the secretary general of the cabinet go there and tell me when there was quorum and was supposed to take place at 12:00, midday.

And I stood on the stairs of the legislative council — said, we came here to actually offer our program to the legislature. They didn’t show up. And that actually made the government a caretaker government for a long period of time.

Now, all of this is known.

What is not known — and you talk about evolution of my thinking. This is a fact and corroborate-able. In April of 2008, less than a year after I became prime minister, I wrote an internal memo that was entitled Gaza. Just one word — Gaza.

And the thesis of that was, the path we are on is not going to restore unity. What is in the way of this is actually continuing to say that unless everybody becomes the same, they cannot join the P.L.O.. This is in writing — my own name and signature. This is also documented.

Members of Hamas used to visit with me in my office. I knew them. We’d talk about things. And we were very clear in terms of our own expectations.

Political dissent is more than welcome, for sure. On security, we stand on a platform of nonviolence. Let’s just be clear on this.

Who is the “we” here?

We is the P.A., of which I was prime minister. So it was very clear to everybody, you know, what we stood on. And by the way, on security, my main preoccupation, coming into the job, was to deal with the lawlessness that was so dominant and prevalent everywhere in the cities of West Bank. And by the way, for the record, that was not Hamas.

But hold on. I want to hold here for a minute and integrate Israel into this conversation.

Yes, OK.

We are now at a point where there is a split. Hamas is running Gaza. The P.A. is running the West Bank.

Yes.

The P.A. has a platform of nonviolence, right? That is a major division between the two sides. But you’re also managing security within the West Bank.

Correct.

You can imagine different paths Israel could take at this moment, in terms of, here’s a partner we can work with, here’s one we can’t. You can imagine a lot of different strategic considerations for them. What was Israel’s relationship to you and to the P.A. in this period?

Was your sense that they were trying to raise up the P.A. as the alternative, such that Hamas would crumble? That they were trying to keep the two divided? How did Israel deal with you and your colleagues?

So in 2007, when I became prime minister, yeah, I got all of those accolades, and “this guy’s serious.”

You were the prime minister of the West liked.

Yeah. I mean —

Western-educated, worked in Western institutions.

— and had a track record of having really delivered on financial reform and all of that sort of thing. Massive coverage.

And by the way, even when I was finance minister — I don’t know many finance ministers who get this much recognition and coverage internationally from all over. Papers in the United States, Europe, everywhere — a lot of media interest in what we were trying to do. And after all, we’re not even a state, which, of course, tells you the extent to which the issue of peace and the Middle East — how important it is internationally. It’s not about me, personally, but this is clearly the kind of promise that people saw in this. So yes, there was that, including in Israel. I mean, a lot of politicians would say all kinds of really good things about this. Prime minister is a really serious man, a man we can do business with, et cetera, et cetera, making it sound like it’s a question of just who, not the process or anything like that.

Translate that into action, into deeds, and look at what happened. A lot can be said about this. I have my own convictions. I come to the conversation with a little bit of bias that I was very explicit on. This doubt that you have — this doubt, I always had this doubt. I always had this worry. I had premonition about things.

I had premonition about Gaza long before I joined the P.A., when I used to just go there as I am a fresh rep, crossing into something that’s really different somehow. And if I may take a step back — and I was not, obviously, involved in Oslo process itself. I was an international civil servant at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. at the time.

And it was not really before I became the resident representative of the I.M.F. to the Palestinian Authority in late ‘95, early ‘96, that I started to read up on the issue in details and studied it very carefully, the agreement. And from early on, I had my doubts, to be very honest, that the framework of that kind was going to really lead us to the promised land.

What were you skeptical about?

The agreement itself, when you really look at it clinically and technically — it’s not based on recognition of any of our national rights as a people. That’s fundamentally important. And history actually bears that out, if you really look at what happened subsequently, and where something is essentially kind of thrown at us. Like, the most recent rendition or version of the so-called two-state solution was contained, arguably, in the Trump peace plan of January 2020.

And essentially, it was like, here is two-state solution. Take it or leave it, and not doing so would be engaging in wasting yet another opportunity for peace. Whereas, the P.L.O., acting on behalf of all Palestinians, recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security. That’s profound, by the way.

So you’re saying that at the base of this, there is an asymmetry, that right at the beginning, Israel was recognized, and the Palestinian state was contingent.

It was more of a promise. Therefore, a promise of state, essentially. They internalized it as such. It was really more of a promise than anything else.

If you look into the agreements themselves, you’re not going to find a single reference, however implicitly, that this is really about Palestinian statehood. It was about self-government for Palestinians, self-rule. That’s what it was about.

So there was no reference to Palestinian sovereignty. I remember, after I became resident representative at the I.M.F., we would go to international meetings, donor meetings, and all. And there are several meetings that were interrupted, almost like, stopped, canceled, because of a reference in one of the international documents or delegations implying Palestinian sovereignty.

This is how delicate the issue was at the time. When late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took the agreements in 1995 to the Knesset, he gave an important speech. And there is, in there, everything that confirms what I have just told you — that this is really about self-rule. And the process was to culminate, in agreement between the sides, on so-called permanent status issues, not statehood.

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So this gets then to your theory of state building, which is that by 2009, there have been many failed peace process attempts. Right? There’s been international meetings. There have been bilateral negotiations, like Abbas Olmert. There have been all these efforts.

They have come to naught.

And so you sort of reverse this idea that instead of waiting for a state recognized and agreed to by Israel and the international community for Palestinians, Palestinians should build what looks like a state, and that will lead to the international recognition and the deal. And so as I understand a lot of your approach here, it actually flips the ordering that had become dominant unto that time.

Absolutely. That’s fair and accurate way of describing my thought processes and how I approach the issue from beginning. To what I told you earlier about my own doubt I long harbored about the capacity of the political process, peace process, to deliver Palestinian statehood, to be quite candid about it, I always was doubtful about that, being able to do it.

And that’s why I invested a lot in the process of making it happen. Creating it — you just create it, make it happen, build it. Build its institutions, project its reality. Let it grow on people, as opposed to it happening top-down. And then, work politically, somehow, with the international community to impart sovereignty.

That was really the equation. So it’s not surprising, actually, shortly, after we launched that plan of 2009, that we jumped on it, even though the world was not consulted on it. I mean, a lot of people think that this was concocted up, some kind of really grand conspiracy or grand game plan agreed with the Americans, with the Europeans, with international financial institutions — none of it.

I held a press conference, said here is our plan. But immediately, the world jumped on it. It had the promise. It had this vision. It has all of these things. But importantly, what many forgot about was the massive major turnaround in security conditions in the West Bank, insofar as the sense of personal security that people had. Main cities in West Bank were kind of no-man’s land, a state of total lawlessness, total chaos. Businesses ransacked, and government offices ransacked, people having no sense of personal security walking the streets night time or anything like that.

Within a matter of short months, it was a complete turnaround in that whole operation. It was a very good example of how we can do things. Then, conditions improved drastically. And you look at the numbers yourself, and you will see that over a four-year period, in terms of casualties of violence and all of that —

So what was Israel’s response to this? Were they delighted? Were they trying to work with you? Were they not?

Two areas I can point to, which were telling of Israel not having been the right state of mind, in terms of political system — center of gravity, as I call it, of the political system. And by that time, of course, Israel has shifted to the right, relative to where it used to be in the mid-90s.

A little bit of very brief rundown of history.

Oslo had segregated the West Bank, in particular into areas A, B, and C. Area A is like urban centers, like cities like Ramallah, Nablus, et cetera, Jenin, Tulkarm, et cetera, major urban areas. In area A, that’s where the Palestinian Authority has sole purview over security and administration.

Then you have area B, where security is kind of a shared responsibility. And then, area C, P.A. has no jurisdiction. In other words, you can’t, if you’re a security officer of P.A., move into area C without prior coordination with Israel. You can’t do that.

So that’s the lay of the land. And it was excluded, by and large, from development. Because to build anything, a room, anything, an extension to your own home, you need to get a permit from Israel. And because Israel, by design, wanted Area C out of the equation, would give only very few permits.

And a lot is known and has been written about the extent to which they demolished existing structures. And they still do to this day. So that’s one real task. I mean, if that state of Palestine is going to emerge and is going to really be fulfilled, minimally speaking, how can the starting point be, the West Bank minus 60 percent of it? I mean, how can this be? It’s unreal. Essentially, that’s what it really meant.

So that’s one test. And there was no change in their policy on that. None, whatsoever. I mean, I remember, because I would struggle. A lot of my focus was on economic development and really getting the economy to move and all of that sort of thing.

And we were hamstrung by those policies, for sure. Nevertheless, we engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Israelis, kind of, really building without permit. And I stand constantly accused with being a thief of Jewish land, because they would not allow us to do it, so we’d just go ahead and do it. Sometimes they demolish, we build again.

So that’s one area; the other is security. Now, Israel was not supposed to, under Oslo, to send its troops to area A, meaning urban areas. If you know Ramallah — I don’t know if you do or not, but in any event — outside of the city, it is a little bit roundabout.

In the early second intifada days, the Israeli army would come in, but would not cross beyond the roundabout. In the spring of 2002, that was broken. They sent the army into the urban centers to stay for a while, then they disengaged from the cities.

But they maintained the practice of in-and-out raids. That’s what they were doing. Now, promise that we stood on — we stood on doctrine of nonviolence. That’s important in everything we did.

And what is it that I was telling people when I visited the region? I used to spend about half of my time touring the country, going to refugee camps. What was it I was talking about?

We stand on nonviolence, and we believe in it. It’s going to deliver us a state. From my point of view, the most important deliverable on Israel’s side would have been to stop the incursions, the military raids into area A.

I would have taken that and kind of made a poster out of it, basically saying, see? We told you. Because the Israelis were on record many times, and to this day, they repeat the same story. If there is security, we will not send the troops.

But there was a marked improvement in security conditions in those four years that I described to you, and this is matter of record they would admit.

My biggest, most important ask of the Israelis, both directly to them and acting through international community, especially the United States, in discussions, meeting after meeting, conferences and all: We need for the incursions to stop.

Why?

Because what defines a state more than where its security services are — nothing else defines statehood more than having your own security there, not Israeli security. The message that would have come out of action by Israel on something like this would have been unmistakably understood as meaning, Israel sees, as an endgame, a separate sovereign Palestinian entity. They didn’t. They did not even reduce the frequency. And sometimes they would just send the troops just for showboating. There’s nothing.

One of the things you’ll hear most often on the Israeli side is that it never had a partner for peace or even a partner. And there are times, I think, where there’s some truth to that. But there’s also this period where Abbas is president and you’re prime minister — I think the view of many, many people is that you were trying to build the kind of state that Israel and the international community had all said, this is what we want — a state that has security cooperation with Israel, that is managing security within the West Bank, that is focusing on economic development, that is committed to nonviolence.

And there is a set of things Israel could have done to help make you successful and to help make what you were doing seem legitimate in the eyes of Palestinians. Right? Like, if you go this path, we get what we want, or we get some amount of what we want.

Exactly.

And there are things they could do to make you look not successful. Right? There’s cooperation, but you’re getting nothing. This path is not going to lead you anywhere.

Yes.

And it sounds like you’re saying they chose the latter. The —

Yes.

— it will not lead you anywhere.

Yes. And the most obvious example of that, of course, which everybody talks about and realizes and recognizes as a key contributor to loss of confidence in the capacity of the framework to deliver Palestinian statehood — continued settlement expansion. I mean, that’s obvious. And administration after administration, secretary of state after secretary of state, envoys, Arab countries were making the point to really bring this to an end. It did not.

But what not many talked about was this other point about security that I told you. And that would have been a very, very powerful message, had they really delivered on that. And they really have to defend their record on this one.

Because they lived up to it up until 2002. But I thought that if we defied the odds, I mean, that process of really working against the odds is something that actually inspires people. And you take risks doing it, but you believe in it.

I mean, after all, even if it failed politically, it certainly would be important for us to really embark on a path like that. Because it leads to empowerment of our own people. And in any scenario, self-empowerment is absolutely essential. That’s key. You have to believe in it. You have to do it. So we took that bet, but no delivery, and then the process fell apart.

If Netanyahu had lost rather than won in 2009, do you think it would have been any different?

That’s a good question. Certainly, it did not make things easier when you have a prime minister who’d come in and, from day one, says — I mean, actually, even going back to 1996 when he first came. He ran against Oslo, when he knew that Oslo actually specifically did not provide for Palestinian statehood.

To this day, he’s taking credit for having been the prime minister who ran against Oslo, and he opposed Oslo, and he brought it down. So he started to not make things easier.

And I want to be fair to the record here, in addition to reflecting my own convictions.

But out of caring about projecting to you how I really feel about this, I can’t say to you that you’re looking at someone who never really felt that the idea of a sovereign state of Palestine on the territory that Israel occupied in 1967 was ever internalized by the Israeli body politic or a center of gravity. That’s what I truly believe.

Let’s just really move, fast-forward to 2020. In what, arguably, can be described as a version of a two-state solution — because people say, two-state solution. They don’t define it.

So Trump can say, oh, yeah, here is one, one state of Palestine, one state of Israel. Not many people read the fine print, or even the full print, of the plan itself.

But it’s very clear to this reader of it — me, myself — there is no Palestinian sovereignty over even 70 percent of the West Bank that we were going to retain. Why? It’s mentioned really casually that Israel would have purview over zoning issues in areas adjacent to the border without defining what “adjacent” means. Given how narrow a strip of land we’re really talking about, we could conceivably — I don’t want to really be hyperbolic about this — but conceivably could have the right to come and say, you can’t build here in outskirts of Ramallah.

So here’s the deal. When I looked at what Oslo was about, and how various Israeli governments behaved, and what the Israeli government had to tell its Knesset back in 1995 to get their approval, and even then barely, by saying explicitly, this is really not a serious state, this is a state minus, what I call state of leftovers — and if that’s the idea, I can tell you it’s a non-starter. That’s what people should understand.

So you’re prime minister until 2013.

Yes.

The story I have heard about this is that you were pushed out by Abbas. What is the end of your prime ministership? What leads to it? How do you understand it?

I did leave, actually, in early June 2013, formally. But I started working on it, going back to 2012. So it took a while. I mean, much like the process I went through when I resigned as finance minister, there were many reasons that really led into that. I was not pushed out. I was not fired, not that.

I would have taken that in a bad way, to be honest with you. And I still wouldn’t, today, look at it that way. But that’s not the truth. The truth is I resigned.

So that story, you don’t feel is true. It’s widely believed.

No, I resigned. I resigned. I voluntarily resigned. I will tell you a variety of reasons.

Over time, I saw this as really not doing what we wanted accomplished.

This, to me, was not about premiership. This, to me, was always about an enterprise leading to freedom for our people — something big.

So April 2011, less than two years into implementing that plan that you referred to — the two-year program, I remember, we were declared as ready for statehood.

It was in Brussels that we got that endorsement from all of the world. And Israel was around the table, by the way, at that meeting. And that’s the statement they issued.

What did I say? I said, job is not done. Gaza is not a part of this. To what end are we doing this? And then, the internal dynamics — the internal dynamics were compelling for me to really actually leave.

And there was beginning a lot of unhappiness within top leadership, taking shots, sometimes needlessly, or without cause or something like that, up and including mobilizing people against an income tax, and with those who are actually demonstrating were instigated by others. So it was really beginning to take on that dimension, which clearly is not really a happy place to be.

Another was — and I will say this as best as I could while being deferential and not wanting to make a story more dramatic than it really was — I have this sense about what government is and what governance is about. And government is a servant. Government should be in the business of really thinking about itself, of itself, as there to serve the people and their interests, and to really look for a way in which it could become, as we were really trying to, a government not only for the people but of the people. And when that didn’t happen, and the system started to really veer more in the direction of higher and higher concentration of powers in the executive, that’s not a situation I was very happy with, to be honest with you.

There is this dispute happening now. I mean, what is happening now in Gaza is a horror. There’s this question of who should run it, also a question, in some ways, of who and how the West Bank will be run. And the Palestinian Authority has collapsed in polling among Palestinians.

The Israelis say they don’t want the Palestinian Authority, or as far as I can tell, any Palestinian control over Gaza or, for that matter, according to Netanyahu, over the West Bank. He at least has said that he does not think having the Palestinian Authority in charge is something he supports.

Americans and Europeans want a major essential role for the Palestinian Authority. You’ve said that just turning it over to the Palestinian Authority in the P.A.‘s current condition is a non-starter. It’s not going to work.

From the perspective of building a Palestinian state, not in terms of its politics but its institutions, its governability, building the kind of thing that you were trying to build, what would you like to see happen? What do you think the realistic proposal is? Not the one that Israel would support, but the one that Joe Biden should demand they support?

You describe the conditions of the Palestinian Authority, its standing, politically speaking. And all of these are facts, indisputable facts. Poll after poll shows that, and the most recent one actually is the most damning and devastating. Not surprisingly so.

But in any event, we are where we are. So looking at the catastrophe that is Gaza today, there has to be the starting point of conversation. And there are different approaches that were talked about really loudly early on, including ideas like a temporary arrangement, provisional arrangement for Gaza, Gaza-only kind of operation to maybe some people from civil society, business community, dealing with the community — all kinds of schemes.

And from the very beginning, I thought that would not be the right way to begin. Because that presumed that the day after was going to be a Hamas-less Gaza. The only thing that I was certain was going to happen — tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost because of this war, to no end.

And so the most sensible thing to do, from my point of view, was to work with what we have, what’s supposed to have been there to begin with — the Palestinian Authority. A version of this appears to have been adopted of what I proposed, for what I call a reconfigured Palestinian Authority, reconstituted Palestinian Authority. The Americans now are using the term, “revitalized,” which could imply more of an administrative, a technocratic kind of strengthening or revitalization.

It is not excluded from our own thinking. To the contrary, key responsibility of the government to be formed is to really actually upgrade the capacity of Palestinian Authority, reform its ways in finance, in security, in all spheres of government. But what is needed upfront is political enablement. Political weakness is a key problem. Anyone will tell you that.

And if you are this weak politically, you cannot govern. You cannot lead effectively. You cannot do anything. Under normal conditions, you have elections, but we didn’t have them in better times. We’re not about to have them now. It’s time of war, and we can’t do that.

And the war continuing cannot but really add to the weakness of Palestinian Authority.

So what we really need as first order of business is to really impart strength, political strength and viability to P.A., until we can have elections. So I thought, maybe, the way to do it, to find a way to impart credibility and inclusivity to the Palestinian Authority through the higher organ — that’s the P.L.O.

And to do that, you need to expand the P.L.O., because the P.L.O. itself is not representative of Palestinian people in an effective sense. Nominally, yes, that’s its title. And I would like for it to forever continue to be that kind of home for us. It means a lot.

Palestinians paid dearly for the P.L.O. to be so recognized. So I don’t take it lightly. But does it really, today, effectively represent the Palestinian people? It doesn’t. Its bet on Oslo failed miserably. And it’s not inclusive in terms of opposition, differing points of views and all of that.

In some places, I’ve seen you say this. You’ve said that to be part of this body, you should have to renounce violence.

Correct.

Hamas, obviously, is the major player here. They are central now in Palestinian politics. Violence is core to their identity.

Yeah.

So isn’t it a paradox to say it should be an inclusive body that includes Hamas, but it also must be a body that renounces violence?

There is, during this transitional period, commitment to be made by the P.L.O. to nonviolence — the expanded P.L.O., meaning everybody will have to really commit to that. And that’s not far-fetched. Now, imagine a situation where, let’s just say, somehow — you mentioned the Americans — President Biden comes and says, OK, boys and girls, it’s time to really be serious. Let’s come to the table. We want to resolve this issue within this timeline. And I’m throwing full weight of the United States behind this effort. All right, who sits at the table? P.L.O..

And as part of that process, just as was expected of us back in 1993, we signed on to a document, declaration of principles. And in there, what we said was we commit to nonviolence. But that’s what the P.L.O. signed on to.

And you said something about, violence is part of the Hamas identity. And it was part of the P.L.O.‘s identity up until they signed that piece of paper in 1993. I mean, factions of the P.L.O. itself, whether Fatah, P.F.L.P., Democratic Front, all of their components, this is armed resistance.

You can’t forever label a faction as forever being one thing or the other. And history is replete with examples like this.

And after all, when peace is made, it’s not really exactly made between good neighbors and happy neighbors.

We need to, at some point, resolve this.

But there is an enormous task that lies ahead of us before we really begin to think about the broader dimensions of the conflict and how it’s going to be resolved and all. The deep scars of this war are going to last forever and ever.

There is so much of rebuilding of human life and a livelihood to really begin before we think about all of these other things that really need to go into, to put us back on some kind of track that could lead to a viable Palestinian state in the way that really actually rises and lives up to the expectations and aspirations of our people. There is that human dimension to that, that we really need to focus on.

And that should really focus the attention on the need to bring this war to an end today before tomorrow, immediately. It’s overdue. All that is really happening now is untold loss of life and livelihood on a daily basis.

People look at numbers — death and all.

But what about the injured? What about lack of medicine? What about lack of food? 25 percent in starvation. No basic amenities of life. This is what we’re looking at.

How is that really going to really help?

There has to really be a political solution to this. And I’m hopeful that, as a matter of fact, the discussions over a potential deal that could lead to, somehow, weeks of respite during this time — no effort should be spared at really bringing this war to an end permanently.

I really appreciate your time here today. I’ll ask you what is always our final question here, which is, what are three books for people who want to understand this better, that you would recommend to the audience?

Well, related to what I just was talking about right now, the importance of good governance, for successful nations and all, I mean, the book that comes to mind is — there are several, but one that comes to mind is “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. This is a good read.

It is really about two important issues, in the way they explain this — about how bad it is to really have high concentration of economic and political power, and how bad it is for countries to be badly governed, meaning poor governance — corruption and all of that. Those who are interested in learning about us in English — it’s called “The Arabs” by Eugene Rogan.

The modern Arab history, beginning, maybe, mid-16th century and over — the beautiful thing about this book is actually, it’s done by an Arab but through the prism of how Arabs themselves see themselves and how they lived and experienced various episodes of their lives, like for example, Arab Spring.

And the third one — how about a novel by a Palestinian writer from Jerusalem?

The name of the author is Nadia Harhash. The title — I’m translating it — is “On the Trails of Miriam,” Miriam being a biblical name. It happens to be a name given to — or the name of four women the book is about.

It does talk about history and the context of the novel and the occupation and experience of being a woman in a society like ours, in a very good way. I don’t know if it has been translated. If it has not, I think it’s really one good translation away from making this author an internationally renowned literary luminary.

Well, we have a lot of people in the publishing industry who listen, so maybe they’ll — maybe they’ll get on that. Salam Fayyad, thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.