Fayyad: No ‘Mickey Mouse State’

Fayyad speaking near Nablus last week.

CREDIT: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said that he won’t accept a “Mickey Mouse state,” if that’s what Israel has in mind for Palestine. Fayyad is the author of an ambitious plan to create a de facto Palestinian state in the next two years, and his reputation as a technocrat and reformist is strong in both the West Bank and in Israel. (Shimon Peres has called him the “Ben Gurion of Palestine.”) But he now says that what would be offered in a potential Israeli peace plan “looks like it would not come close to what we have in mind.” Previously, Fayyad had been more conciliatory about Netanyahu’s demands—once telling Haaretz, for instance, that he had no real opinion on whether Israel should be designated a “Jewish state,” one of Netanyahu’s preconditions for proceeding with peace talks. But since Israel has come out against Fayyad’s proposal to create the all fundamentals of a Palestinian state—infrastructure, independent security forces, foreign investment—in anticipation of actual political statehood, he’s grown grumpier.

Fayyad to Obama: Tell Israel no Mickey Mouse State [Reuters]