Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

The Myth of the Palestinian Authority’s Readiness for Statehood

Published July 5, 2011

One great mystery of the Palestinian Authority’s bid for recognition as a state in September is why reputable agencies like the World Bank and the IMF would discredit themselves by declaring the PA ready for statehood. That assertion was belied once again this weekend, when Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced PA employees will get only half their salaries this month because international donors have thus far coughed up only $330 million of the $970 million they pledged, and foreign aid accounts for fully a quarter of the PA budget.

As Omri noted here last month, one requirement for being a functioning state rather than a failed one is being able to pay the bills, so it’s hard to claim the PA is ready for statehood when it depends on donations that frequently don’t materialize. And the Arab states responsible for the current shortfall are serial defaulters on their pledges to the PA.

Indeed, Palestinians themselves don’t consider their government(s) functional, which makes it even harder to see the PA as ready for statehood. Last month, for instance, Gaza residents blocked access to UNRWA summer camps to demand the UN agency rebuild their houses, which were destroyed during the second intifada. They didn’t address this demand to Gaza’s official Hamas-run government. Nor did they address it to the PA, though Hamas and the Fatah-led PA recently signed a unity deal whose stated purposes include reconstructing Gaza. Faced with two Palestinian governments that could credibly be deemed responsible, the demonstrators dismissed them both as useless and pinned their hopes on UNRWA.

Compounding the problem is the fact that continued donations from Western countries – which generally do honor their pledges, and hence constitute the mainstay of the PA’s budget – depend largely on the presence of one man: Fayyad. This is widely recognized by Palestinians: A poll last month found they preferred Fayyad as the unity government’s prime minister by a two-to-one margin over Hamas’ candidate; the pollster attributed this to the belief Fayyad’s presence would reduce or eliminate the danger of international sanctions against the unity government. PA President Mahmoud Abbas also recognizes this. Indeed, he warned Hamas this weekend that its opposition to Fayyad endangered the statehood bid, because “we are subject to very sensitive and fateful conditions.” Translation: To continue donating, the West needs a government with a non-corrupt, non-terrorist facade, and Fayyad is the only man who can provide it.

It’s hard to see how the PA can be deemed ready for statehood if its financial viability depends on the continued tenure of one individual. After all, Fayyad isn’t immortal; what happens if he dies? And it’s especially hard when one partner in the unity government is adamantly demanding his ouster.

In sum, we have a would-be state whose viability depends on unreliable donations plus a single individual whom half  his government wants to oust, and whose own citizens don’t see as capable of addressing basic needs. In what conceivable sense does that constitute readiness for statehood?

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/05/the-myth-of-the-palestinian-authoritys-readiness-for-statehood/
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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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