Analisi, acuta come sempre, di Nathan Brown su quello che Thomas Friedman ha definito fayyadismo. Mi sembra molto più solida e approfondita l’analisi di Brown di quella di Friedman. Worth reading….
From the perspective of the earlier reform movement, there is one vital missing ingredient in the current Ramallah leadership’s approach—democracy. The Ramallah PA is headed by an elected president, but the cabinet has no democratic credentials and the elected parliament has been effectively suspended. (The speaker, from the rival Hamas movement, found that he was locked out of the building when he tried to return to his office after his recent release from an Israeli prison.) The courts, which show some signs of resuming their function, enjoy greater autonomy than they have had in the past—answering a decade of demands for an independent judiciary, but hardly correcting for the lack of democracy. And the police and security forces are tasked not merely with enforcing traffic laws and intimidating local gangs (that doubled as militias and protection rackets during the intifada) but also with a widespread crackdown on Hamas throughout the West Bank.
The campaign against Hamas in the West Bank has been thorough and driven much of the movement in areas under Ramallah’s control into hibernation or underground activity: Hamas activists have been arrested (the movement charges that close to one thousand of its members are currently detained and that five have died in custody), mosques and officially-sanctioned charities have been brought under strict control, pro-Hamas civil servants have lost their jobs, and NGOs associated with Hamas have been shut down. Thus the much ballyhooed improvements in security are indelibly linked in the West Bank to an unpopular campaign of political repression—Hamas is disliked by many Palestinians, but most still regard it as a legitimate political actor rather than as an organization to be suppressed.
Aware of its lack of legitimacy, the Ramallah PA has taken limited steps to regularize its rule. An ad hoc procedure has been created to draft decree-laws in the absence of parliament to ensure full consultation with all ministries and to postpone matters that are not urgent until democratic procedures are restored. Written and oral instructions have been delivered to all security services to obey court orders, even if they involve the release of a Hamas activist (only a small minority of detainees have been able to secure their release through legal procedures, however). The cabinet may move toward a system in which each ministry forms a consultative committee composed of officials and leading citizens and NGOs to guide its work.
Even if regularized and softened, the result is undeniably authoritarian. To be sure, this is a new kind of authoritarianism, at least for Palestinians.