American policy makers have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan the costs of pretending that strong institutions and viable political processes are emerging; in both cases the institutions and processes actually being built sometimes had too loose a connection to politics on the ground. U.S. leaders have learned the mistakes of relying too heavily on attractive local interlocutors and treating them as surrogates for genuine institutional development and deeply-rooted political processes.
But those lessons are being forgotten in Palestine. Relying on “Fayyadism”—Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s program to build a Palestinian state despite occupation and internal division—alone will likely lead to failure and disappointment. Technocratic management can probably keep Palestinian institutions afloat and even improve their functioning in some limited ways. But it does not even pretend to offer a solution for the deeper problems afflicting Palestinian politics—division, repression, occupation, alienation, and wide-reaching institutional decay.
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http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41585