Salam Fayyad: The Man Who Tried To Build A Palestinian State.
When Palestinians had a different choice, and rejected it.
In my last essay entitled “The “Palestinian Mandela” Lie: Why the Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouti is a Moral Fraud”, I dismantled the myth surrounding Marwan Barghouti, exposing how the West fetishizes a convicted terrorist while ignoring his record of bloodshed. But the tragedy of Palestinian leadership is not about the murderers they lionize. It is about the builder they destroyed. This is the story of Salam Fayyad.
This essay is not an argument against Palestinian self-determination. It is an argument for taking it seriously. Too much writing about this conflict treats Palestinians as either saints without agency or villains without complexity. Both approaches flatten reality and excuse failure. I believe Palestinians, like Israelis, deserve to be judged as political actors capable of making choices, building institutions, and bearing responsibility for the outcomes of those choices.
Salam Fayyad matters because he breaks a convenient myth. He was not exiled by Israel or assassinated by extremists. He was removed by his own leadership and rejected by a political culture that has too often rewarded grievance over governance. His story complicates the claim that Israel is the sole obstacle to peace and challenges the international habit of outsourcing Palestinian accountability. Telling this story is uncomfortable. It requires acknowledging Israeli mistakes without turning them into absolution for Palestinian dysfunction. It requires recognizing that statehood is not a slogan or a UN vote, but a set of institutions, behaviors, and norms that must be built and defended from within.
After October 7, it is no longer enough to chant abstractions about justice or occupation. If peace is ever to be more than a ritual incantation, it will require leaders who build rather than burn, and a public willing to choose them. This essay is about the man Palestinians had, and lost, who tried to do exactly that.
Anti‑Zionists claim that Palestinians ‘tried peace and Israel crushed it.’ In their telling, Oslo was a genuine path to coexistence that Israel sabotaged with settlements and bad faith, and the Gaza withdrawal was a trick that left Palestinians in a prison camp rather than a chance to build a state. The record tells a different story: Palestinian leaders rejected key compromises, unleashed terror before, during and after Oslo, and turned Gaza into a base for war instead of investing in building a state seeking peaceful coexistence with its neighbor. They will point to Marwan Barghouti and call him the “Palestinian Mandela”. They will point to Mubarak Awad and call him the “Palestinian Gandhi”. They will tell you the “moderates” were eliminated or sidelined because Israel never wanted peace. It is a tidy story. It is also a fabrication and a distortion of history.
For almost a century, history tells a very different story. In 1937 and 1947, Arab leaders rejected partition plans that would have created an Arab state alongside a Jewish one and chose war instead. In the wake of the 6-day war in 1967, the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its famous “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it. At Camp David in 2000, Arafat walked away from a proposal that would have given him a demilitarized state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza and chose the Second Intifada instead of tabling an executable counterproposal. In 2008 Abbas failed to accept or even formally answer Ehud Olmert’s map, which went even further; he later acknowledged on the record that he said no. Even after Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian politics elevated Hamas, which turned the Strip into a launchpad for rockets rather than a pilot project in state‑building.
If you want to understand why there is still no Palestinian state, it is time to talk honestly about the one man who actually tried to build one.
And what was done to thwart his efforts.
His name is Salam Fayyad.
Ultimately, his demise was not imposed from outside. It came from within the Palestinian system itself.
The Technocrat Who Wanted To Skip The Revolution
Salam Fayyad is everything Western diplomats say they wish Palestinian leaders would be. He did not grow up in a terror camp. He grew up in a classroom. He studied in Texas, earned a PhD in economics, worked for the IMF and then the World Bank. When he came back to the Palestinian Authority he did not ask for a militia. He asked for a calculator. He became PA finance minister in 2002 and started trying to clean up decades of PLO corruption and opaque accounting. But while Fayyad was quietly balancing books, the politics around him were moving in the opposite direction.
In the wake of the Second Intifada and amid deep Israeli and Palestinian exhaustion, in 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It removed every soldier and settler from inside the Strip and dismantled all settlements, but no peace agreement followed, no negotiations concluded, and no Palestinian state emerged.
Hamas seized on that political vacuum, arguing that Israel had withdrawn not because of diplomacy, but because of ‘resistance’ and violence, and presenting itself as the force that had driven Israel out. That claim proved politically potent.
In January 2006, Palestinians held legislative elections across both the West Bank and Gaza. When Palestinians went to the polls, Hamas was no longer just an opposition movement. It was presenting itself as the force that had driven Israel out, while technocrats like Fayyad were offering budgets, institutions, and restraint in a political culture primed to reward confrontation. Hamas won a national plurality of the vote and an outright parliamentary majority. The result reflected a political culture that strongly favored movements promising resistance over reform.
Hamas’ victory produced an immediate crisis. It refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence, or accept prior agreements, triggering international isolation and a financial collapse inside the Palestinian Authority. What followed was not peaceful power sharing, but an armed struggle between Hamas and Fatah for control of the Palestinian system.
Then came 2007. Hamas seized Gaza in a violent coup. They threw Fatah men off rooftops and took full control of the Strip, expelling the Palestinian Authority entirely. This was not an electoral transition but a forcible takeover.
In response, Mahmoud Abbas declared a state of emergency, dissolved the Hamas-led government, suspended parliament, and appointed Fayyad to lead an emergency cabinet in Ramallah. That government was not elected and exercised authority only in the West Bank, after Gaza fell under Hamas control.
On paper, Fayyad was now prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, but he governed only one fragmented territory: The West Bank.1
His job was not to inspire a revolution. It was to keep a half‑built polity from collapsing. Fayyad had something much less romantic than a “resistance” movement. He had a police force that needed training, civil servants who needed salaries, donors who needed reassuring, and an Israeli army that still controlled the air, the borders, and the ultimate security decisions over most of the land.
He decided to try something no one in the Palestinian movement had really attempted before or since. Instead of waiting for a grand summit at Camp David or some new UN resolution, he would decide to build the skeleton of a state first. He called his two year blueprint: “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” It came out in August 2009. The document is worth reading.
He did not call for a third intifada. He called for separation of powers, rule of law, professional courts, accountable ministries, human rights protections, and an end to collective punishment. He promised institutions that would serve citizens “without discrimination on any grounds whatsoever.”
His theory was simple and radical. If we build a functioning state in all but name, the world will have to recognize what already exists. If we act like adults, treat our people as citizens instead of cannon fodder, and stop outsourcing our dignity to the next “resistance” fad, we might actually win.
It is hard to overstate how un‑Palestinian this thinking was.
The dominant current of the movement for a century has not been liberation through responsibility. It has been liberation through negation. The goal has not been building something new. It has been undoing something old. Undoing the existence of a Jewish state.
Fayyad was trying to reverse that logic. He wanted to make Palestinian freedom depend on Palestinian capacity, not on Jewish disappearance.
That made him a stranger in his own political culture.
What Fayyad Actually Did
This is not a story of “good intentions that never left the page.” He did real, measurable things.
Under Fayyad, the PA pursued an aggressive program of security sector reform in the West Bank. With American and Jordanian training, new Palestinian security forces were deployed in cities like Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron. Their mission was not to join the militias. It was to shut them down.
Militias were disarmed. Visible gunmen were taken off the streets. Law and order improved in many urban centers. PA forces coordinated with the IDF and with Shin Bet to go after Hamas cells and criminal gangs. That cooperation was deeply unpopular on the Palestinian street, but it made daily life safer and allowed businesses to take risks again.
At the same time, Fayyad restructured public finances. He consolidated hundreds of opaque accounts into a single treasury. He published budgets. He reduced patronage and insisted that public money was not private revolutionary property. Salary payments became more predictable. Donors, for the first time, felt they were dealing with someone who spoke their language.
World Bank and IMF reports from 2010 and 2011 are almost surreal to read today. They concluded that the PA, under Fayyad’s reforms, had institutions “above the threshold” needed for a functioning state “at any point in the near future,” at least in the areas where it actually governed.
That is diplomatic jargon for the following simple truth: On paper, the Palestinian Authority under Fayyad could have run a state.
If the politics allowed it.
He improved tax collection. He streamlined customs. He invested in infrastructure projects and encouraged private sector development, especially around Ramallah. He tried to make the PA look less like a corrupt patronage machine and more like what he called “a service oriented government.”
He also articulated, in public, what almost no Palestinian leader dares say.
That the path to freedom runs through responsibility. That institutions and behavior had to change in Ramallah, not just in Jerusalem and Washington.
You might think this would have made him a hero.
The world loves to say it is waiting for a Palestinian partner who rejects violence, accepts Israel’s existence, and focuses on building institutions.
Fayyad did all three.
And look what happened next.
How To Destroy A State Builder
Fayyad was attacked from three directions at once.
From Israel.
From the international system.
And, most tragically, from the Palestinian people.
First, there was Israel, which never fully trusted what Fayyad was trying to build. I will not deny that Israel made Fayyad’s job harder. During the years of his experiment, Israeli governments under Netanyahu continued to approve and expand settlements in Judea and Samaria within Area C (the 60 percent of the territory that remained under full Israeli control under Oslo). New housing units, roads, and outposts multiplied. Checkpoints and restrictions on Palestinian movement, land use, and building permits remained deeply intrusive.2
To many in the Israeli security establishment, Fayyad’s 2009 plan was not a blueprint for prosperity; it was a unilateral move that pushed beyond the Oslo framework. Fayyad explicitly intended to build infrastructure in Area C without waiting for a final‑status agreement with Israel. Israeli officials saw this as an attempt to pre‑determine borders and facts on the ground and to entrench Palestinian control over strategic high ground they considered vital for Israel’s defense. They feared that a competent, de facto Palestinian state in strategic areas would constrain Israel’s long-term security posture more effectively than a chaotic one.3
From a Palestinian’s perspective, however, the message was simple: “Your prime minister Fayyad says we will have a state in two years, yet we still cannot drive to Jerusalem without permits and humiliation. Why should we believe him?” Fayyad was selling hope under occupation while the physical map on the ground seemed to tell a different story.
When Abbas decided to bypass negotiations with Israel and go to the UN for recognition in 2011 and 2012, Fayyad opposed it. He warned that chasing empty titles in New York would trigger an Israeli financial response that would crush the real state‑building in Ramallah. Abbas ignored him. He chose the symbolism. As Fayyad anticipated, Israel froze the tax revenue, using a tool it had used before and would use again in response to Palestinian unilateral steps. The US backed Israel in its opposition to the Palestinian campaign, and has said it will use its veto to block a membership request submitted to UN Security Council. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it would release the frozen funds “in the wake of the cessation of unilateral steps by the Palestinian Authority”.
But to say “Netanyahu did everything to undermine Fayyad” is to turn a complex tragedy into a fairy tale. Israel did make his work harder through settlements, restrictions, and financial pressure. Yet even that is only half the story, because it was Fayyad’s own leadership and system that ultimately stabbed his plan in the back.
Then there was the international system, which praised Fayyad loudly and abandoned him quietly. The entire Fayyad project depended on external money. But the international community, and specifically the Arab world, treated Fayyad like a luxury item: nice to have, but the first thing to cut when times got tough.
Arab states were the worst offenders. They famously promised a financial “safety net” pledging $100 million a month to cover the gaps whenever Israel withheld tax revenues. It was a lie. The money rarely showed up. Fayyad was forced to act as a beggar in Gulf capitals just to pay the salaries of teachers and nurses in Ramallah. While Arab leaders gave speeches about the “sacred Palestinian cause,” they let the man actually building the state starve for cash.
Meanwhile, the West suffered from a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. By 2011, the Arab Spring was consuming all the oxygen in the room. The Obama administration and European capitals were focused on Egypt, Syria, and Libya. The boring work of Palestinian institution-building was no longer the priority.
When Europe, the US, and Arab states reduced budget support or shifted priorities, Fayyad had to impose more austerity just to keep the PA’s lights on. Every time Abbas did something symbolic like a UN bid, Israel punished the PA financially. Donors did not step in fast enough to cover the gaps.
So the very system that supposedly “rewarded moderates” left him exposed. They praised him in English press conferences, but when Abbas moved to crush him, they issued polite statements and moved on. They loved the results he produced, but they refused to spend the political capital necessary to protect him.
But the decisive blow did not come from outside. It came from within Palestinian politics itself. Start with Ramallah. Fatah barons despised him. He was not one of them. He was not born in Tunis exile networks. He had not done time in an Israeli prison. He was not a veteran of Arafat’s circle. He was a technocrat parachuted in by donors, with his own relationships in Washington and Brussels.
Worse, he threatened their income. By centralizing finances, insisting on transparency, and cutting back on ghost jobs and slush funds, Fayyad assaulted the patronage system that kept Fatah loyalists loyal. People who had gotten used to “revolutionary perks” on the budget suddenly faced audits.
They did not thank him for it.
But the problem went deeper than corrupt elites. Fayyad had a “democratic deficit” with the public, too. Because Hamas had won the 2006 election, Fayyad’s emergency government essentially had to bypass democracy to function.
As the Carnegie Endowment noted in a 2010 assessment:
To the extent that Fayyadism is building institutions, it is unmistakably doing so in an authoritarian context.
Carnegie’s point was not that Fayyad alone made the system authoritarian, but that state‑building was taking place after elections had been frozen and normal parliamentary oversight sidelined.
To build a state acceptable to the world, Fayyad had to bypass the parliament acceptable to his own people. He was effective, but to the average Palestinian, his efficiency felt like an imposition.
In the 2006 legislative elections, his “Third Way” party won only 2.4% of the vote. Ordinary Palestinians did not view him as a savior; many viewed him as a banker for the occupation. He was offering them balanced budgets; they had been raised on a diet of revolution. This was not universal, but it was politically dominant. When he tried to act like a statesman, the street did not see “sovereignty.” They saw “collaboration.”
At the same time, his austerity measures hurt ordinary Palestinians. To stabilize the PA’s finances, he raised taxes and cut subsidies. When donor money slowed and Israel withheld clearance revenues in response to Abbas’ UN statehood bid, he struggled to pay salaries.
By 2012, protests in the West Bank were not directed at Hamas or even at Israel. They were directed at Salam Fayyad. Demonstrators blamed him for price hikes, unemployment, and the daily indignities of living under an authority that seemed unable to deliver a dividend for its cooperation with Israel. Fayyad knows exactly who was behind those protests. In a 2024 interview with Ezra Klein at the New York Times, he finally admitted that the demonstrators were “instigated by others” within the “top leadership.” He wasn’t brought down by the street; he was brought down by the palace. Fatah elites mobilized the mob against him to protect their own power.
Mahmoud Abbas also had his own reasons to want Fayyad gone. Fayyad’s independent legitimacy in Western eyes made Abbas look small. He did not control Fatah. He did not have a militia. But he had something Abbas did not. Credibility with the people who wrote the checks.
That was intolerable.
Fayyad saw the writing on the wall. In that same 2024 NY Times interview, he explained that he resigned because the Palestinian system was veering toward a “higher and higher concentration of powers” in Abbas’s hands. While Fayyad was trying to build institutions, Abbas was busy turning the PA into a one-man show.
Meanwhile, Hamas and other rejectionist factions painted Fayyad as a collaborator. Their narrative was simple. He was policing the West Bank on Israel’s behalf and stabilizing the occupation instead of fighting it.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “subcontractor of the occupation.” That is where it comes from.
By April 2013, the pressure became unsustainable. Abbas accepted Fayyad’s resignation. The West issued statements praising his service and then promptly got back to business with the same old faces in Fatah.
The one man who had actually tried to make Palestinian governance look like something other than a permanent protest movement was out.
The old habits were back in.
And here is where you see the starkest moral contrast.
While Fayyad was trying to build a culture of accountability, the Palestinian Authority under Abbas kept running the Martyrs Fund and Prisoners Fund aka the “Pay to Slay” program. These programs send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to convicted terrorists and to the families of “martyrs,” with stipend size increasing with sentence length. The more Jews you kill, the more your family gets.
That is not a social safety net. It is a financial infrastructure for terror.
So Fayyad’s West Bank was a strange hybrid.
On the one hand, modern ministries, reformed security forces, and institutional capacity that impressed the World Bank.
On the other hand, a political leadership that continued to glorify “martyrs,” pay salaries to killers, and refuse to prepare its people for any real compromise with Israel.
You cannot build a healthy state on that foundation.
Fayyad tried anyway.
His own system spat him out.4
The Warning Everyone Ignored
You might think that after the catastrophe of October 7, the Palestinian national movement would finally look in the mirror. This was not a tragedy that fell from a clear blue sky. It grew out of a political story that began with the Second Intifada, the decision to reward Hamas at the ballot box in 2006, and the belief that “resistance” had succeeded where diplomacy failed.
The message many Palestinians took from the Second Intifada and from Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was simple: violence works, and the people who preach it deliver results. October 7 was that logic pushed to its most monstrous conclusion.
Salam Fayyad tried to hold that mirror up. On October 11, 2023, just four days after the massacres, while the world was still reeling, Fayyad published a stark warning in The Economist. While others were busy justifying the attacks or blaming Israel entirely, Fayyad identified the rot inside his own house.
The Palestinian cause, he wrote, “has been damaged by factionalism.”
He argued that the endless split between Fatah and Hamas and the refusal to unite under a single, responsible authority had created the vacuum that led to disaster. His solution wasn’t a “Day of Rage.” It was a call to immediately expand the PLO to include opposition groups on the condition that they commit to non-violence and a unified political program.
He was pleading, once again, for logic.
He was arguing that you cannot have a state if you have two governments. You cannot have freedom if your strategy is split between diplomats in Ramallah and tunnel-commanders in Gaza.
As usual, his advice was drowned out.
Hamas preferred the glory of “resistance” even if it meant the destruction of Gaza. Fatah preferred the comfort of its decaying fiefdom in the West Bank. And the world preferred to ignore the internal Palestinian rot and focus exclusively on Israeli airstrikes.
Fayyad is still one of the very few Palestinian leaders offering a route to unity that does not involve more suicide vests. And he is still the man nobody in power wants to listen to.
How Palestinian Agency Was Erased
This conflict is almost always framed as a morality play with a single villain. Israel does something, Palestinians react, and the story ends there. Agency flows in only one direction. When Palestinians fail, responsibility is reassigned elsewhere. When Palestinian leaders reject viable paths forward, the rejection is explained away as inevitability rather than choice. Over time, this framing has hardened into a modern blood libel that says: “Israel is the main obstacle to peace. If only Palestinians had a state, everything would be fine.” In this telling, Palestinian political decisions disappear entirely, replaced by a reflexive assumption that Israel is the sole author of every outcome. That erasure is not neutral. It is the core distortion that makes honest analysis impossible.
You have seen this narrative in a thousand forms. The ‘occupation’ becomes the excuse for an obsession that long ago stopped being about human rights and became a way to explain every Palestinian failure through Jewish sovereignty itself. The settlements are “the core impediment.” Every failure is externalized, every choice reframed as coercion. Responsibility never quite lands where decisions are made. Over time, this pattern has produced a worldview in which everything starts and ends with the Jew. What begins as rhetoric does not stay rhetorical for long. It hardens into policy, procedure, and institutional obsession.
UN voting patterns show how the international system has turned this into a ritual. This fixation is measurable. From 2015 to 2025, the UN General Assembly passed 173 resolutions singling out Israel and only 71 for the rest of the world combined. The Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item for Israel. No one else gets that treatment.
Salam Fayyad’s story punctures that narrative.
Because here is what actually happened.
A Palestinian leader tried to:
Reject violence and prioritize institution building.
Cooperate with Israel on security to stabilize the West Bank.
Present a detailed, time bound plan to create the infrastructure of a democratic state.
Earn statehood through performance rather than through terror or UN theatrics.
The response was:
Israel thanked him for security cooperation while continuing to entrench settlements and operate a system in Area C that undermined his promise of imminent sovereignty in Palestinian eyes while viewing his unilateral plans as a violation of the very agreements that created his authority.
Donors applauded, then let him twist in the wind financially when politics got hard.
Fatah elites sabotaged him to protect their patronage and power.
He was never given a direct electoral mandate; Palestinians had already chosen movements that promised “resistance” over reform when he was brought in as a technocratic stopgap.
Hamas denounced him as a collaborator and continued to fire rockets from Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority maintained “pay to slay” stipends that directly contradicted his ethos of responsibility.
When he finally was replaced, the world shrugged and went back to blaming Israel alone.
If Israel were truly the only obstacle to Palestinian statehood, Fayyad’s experiment would have ended very differently.
The truth is more uncomfortable for the anti-zionists. It exposes that there is a deep ideological commitment in large parts of the Palestinian movement not to build a state next to Israel, but to ensure Israel doesn’t exist at all.
That is why at Camp David in 2000, Arafat walked away from an offer that would have given him a demilitarized state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza and chose the Second Intifada instead of a counterproposal. That is why in 2008 Abbas failed to accept or even formally answer Ehud Olmert’s map, which went even further. That is why in 2020 the PA dismissed the Trump plan with “a thousand nos” before it was fully published.
This was not due to ignorance or lack of exposure to alternatives. It is because the core ethos of the movement has never fully shifted from “undo Israel” to “build Palestine.”
Fayyad tried to shift it.
He lost.
Why Telling This Story Matters
So why write about Salam Fayyad in a Substack dedicated to debunking blood libels.
Because every dishonest narrative about this conflict depends on disappearing people like him.
When you erase Fayyad, you can pretend:
Palestinians never had a serious state building option.
Israel killed or exiled every moderate.
The only choices were terror or surrender.
That is false.
There was a third option.
Nation building under occupation.
Hard. Imperfect. Often humiliating.
But real.
For a brief moment, that option was on the table in the “West Bank”.
It was not crushed by Israel.
It was crushed by Palestinian leaders who prefer the politics of grievance. By a Palestinian public that has been taught to view compromise as treason.
By international institutions that prefer an eternal refugee problem over holding Palestinians accountable for their own choices.
When people chant “from the river to the sea” and tell you this is a cry for “justice,” they want you to forget the builders and remember only the bombers.
They want you to see Marwan but never Salam.
They want you to believe there was never a serious Palestinian who tried to build a future that did not require you to dismantle the Jewish state first.
Fayyad’s story does not absolve Israel of every mistake. It does not excuse every checkpoint or every settlement decision. It does not magically solve the conflict.
But it does something essential.
It restores Palestinian agency to the story.
It forces us to say out loud what so many in the “international community” refuse to admit.
The main obstacle to peace is not where Jews live. It is the refusal, on the other side, to choose leaders who build instead of leaders who burn. If the world is ever going to stop repeating modern blood libels about the Jewish state, it has to start by telling the truth about the man Palestinians had, and lost, who actually tried to make peace real by picking up a budget spreadsheet instead of a bomb.
His name is Salam Fayyad.
They just did not choose him.
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When people today say “Palestinians tried building civil society and Israel crushed it,” you could be forgiven for thinking they mean Gaza too. That if only Israel had rewarded this effort, the Strip would look like Singapore instead of a rocket launching pad. That never happened. Fayyad never had any authority over Gaza. Since 2007, Gaza has been ruled by Hamas, which seized the Strip in a violent coup and has been the de facto governing authority ever since. Hamas has shown no interest in state‑building or peaceful coexistence. It built rockets and tunnels and turned Gaza into a forward base for war because it is structured as a death cult, not a government.
Fayyad is not the only Palestinian who tried to build rather than burn. But he is the clearest symbol of a thin, embattled minority. Take Bashar Masri and Rawabi. Rawabi is the first planned Palestinian city. A modern hilltop town north of Ramallah with apartment blocks, a shopping center, an amphitheater, and broadband. It was financed with Qatari money and built under PA auspices. Masri’s idea was straightforward. If settlers create “facts on the ground” by building on hilltops, Palestinians should do the same. Not with outposts. With mortgages and playgrounds. But Masri faced attack from the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, who accused him of “normalizing the occupation” by inviting Israeli companies to the city. In their eyes, creating jobs and building homes is “collaboration” if it does not center on resistance. Then there is Mubarak Awad, the so-called Palestinian Gandhi. Awad advocated a nonviolent strategy during the first Intifada. Anti-Zionists love to cite Awad as evidence that Israel “eliminates moderates” (he was deported in 1988). What they skip is that his approach never had deep roots inside Palestinian society or institutions. He was a moral voice not a state-builder.