First Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad gave an interview to Haaretz in which he seemed to acquiesce to his Israeli counterpart’s proposal of “economic peace.” Now comes word that Fayyad has drafted a proposal for a de facto Palestinian state that would emerge in 2011. “We have decided to be proactive, to expedite the end of the occupation by working very hard to build positive facts on the ground, consistent with having our state emerge as a fact that cannot be ignored,” he told The Times of London. If accurate, this plan represents a repudiation of years of political wrangling for peace with the Israelis—something that many observers on both sides, 16 years after Oslo, don’t anticipate any time soon. One wonders, then, if Fayyad has taken a lesson from Nouri al-Maliki’s Iraq: the fastest way to convince the world of your sovereignty is to take control of your own internal security forces and infrastructure so as to obviate a foreign occupation on material, rather than political or moral, grounds. As The Scroll has noted in the past few months, Netanyahu’s government seems keen on working with this approach.
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August 25, 2009