A HAMILTON FOR PALESTINE

The Radical Bean Counter (JAMES BENNET, May 25, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

This is a story about fighting Palestinian chaos and corruption, about seeking to throw off Israeli occupation and build a democratic state of Palestine. It is about these things, because it is about one man's lonely pursuit of direct deposit.

The man is Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian minister of finance, the kind of Palestinian you rarely hear about, an economist trained in Texas who has never fired a gun, sent men into battle or served time in prison or exile. He met recently in Gaza City with half a dozen men who had done these things -- who do some of them still -- the chiefs of Yasir Arafat's Gaza security services, the most hardened of Palestinian warriors. It was Fayyad's intention to intimidate them.

As the chiefs arrived at the Saraya, the military headquarters in Gaza, some of them wore fatigues and were trailed by men carrying guns. Fayyad, as usual, arrived alone, carrying his black satchel and wearing his nice blue jacket, red-and-blue tie and spectacles.

Fayyad did not tell these men everything he thought: that he was horrified by the system, if it could be called that, for paying the 53,000 security officers from the dozen independent security agencies in the West Bank and Gaza; that he thought it was morally wrong to dole out $20 million in cash monthly, in plastic bank bags, to the security chiefs, to be handed out to their men, one by one; that he worried that some of the money, ''paying'' for ghost employees, might be lining the wrong people's pockets, perhaps even financing the kind of violence the security agencies were supposed to stop.

He did not make a point obvious to everyone in the room: that the power of the purse is power, period, and that his reform would help shift control of the officers from these chiefs, and from Yasir Arafat, to the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. In theory, Fayyad now reports to Abbas; in practice, he checks in with both him and Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who appointed him last June; in reality, he is choosing his battles for himself.

Fayyad presented his idea as a common-sense change that anyone who favored efficiency and clean government -- as security officers naturally did -- would support. He had already divided the chiefs by previously persuading two of them. Now he, the economist, not any of the military men, began pounding the table. Unless the chiefs switched to direct deposit of paychecks, he said, he could not guarantee that their salaries would be paid. Foreign donors would cut them off. Did they want to be forced by outsiders to change, or to act with a sense of pride? [...]

This is a terrible time to be the average Palestinian, and so it is a golden time to become an exceptional one. The Palestinians are at a historic moment in search of historic leaders -- the Jeffersons, Hamiltons and Washingtons who can wrest a viable, competent state from Israelis (even on the left) who are distrustful and angry; from a Bush administration that is chilly and distracted; and from Islamists who seem bent on endless conflict. [...]

Fayyad, an ally of the prime minister and one who would clearly like to have his job someday, presents a different case study in the use of power. He dismissed the security detail that the Palestinian Authority offered him, in the belief he should never show fear. He travels by car service and taxi, walks alone across checkpoints and fields his own calls nonstop on a cellphone. The father of three children in a Jerusalem private school, he left a much more lucrative job to become finance minister at about $1,200 a month, and Israeli and American officials who study the Palestinian Authority say he is an honest man. He has been praised by Colin Powell, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat; despite that, he has flourished politically. His suits, hair and skin are all rather gray, like the dense cloud of cigarette smoke in which he moves. At 51, he is fidgety, ambitious, profoundly sure of himself. He is a small, assuming man.

''If you have the authority, use it,'' Fayyad likes to say. ''If you don't have it, create it.''

The challenge to such new leaders is to fight two revolutions at once: against the Israeli occupation and against the aristocracy of revolution that has shaped the Palestinian national dream for 35 years. Arafat got his people very far -- within sight of their state -- but he has not delivered them.

The idea that Palestine's future depends on discovering a generation of leaders similar to our Founders is rather depressing, even if accurate. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2003 7:01 PM