In an interview with Roger Cohen of the New York Times, outgoing Prime Minister Fayyad said that the Palestinian “story is a story of failed leadership… It is incredible that the fate of the Palestinian people has been in the hands of leaders so entirely casual, so guided by spur-of-the-moment decisions, without seriousness. We don’t strategize, we cut deals in a tactical way and we hold ourselves hostage to our own rhetoric.”

He told Cohen that when faced with a Fatah old guard whose greed and corruption were hampered by his activities and intransigence between Fatah and Hamas as to how to engage Israel, Fayyad resigned his position. “The system is not taking, the country is suffering. They are not going to change their ways and therefore I must go.”

According to Cohen, Fayyad thinks the United States should ask Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  straight out: What do you mean by a Palestinian state?  “A state of leftovers is not going to do it,” Fayyad said.

The essential precondition for a problem solution, he says, is a “security doctrine based on nonviolence.” Hamas must irrevocably renounce violence. Then there would be “conditions for takeoff that would not be perfect, but when did the perfect ever prevail?”

The former finance minister also said, “There cannot be two Palestines. One is hard enough. If Hamas will not cede its weapons to Fatah —if the putative state does not, in Weber’s famous definition, have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory—there will be no state.”

I resigned my job, that’s all,” Fayyad told Cohen. “I am not resigned, even if it pains me additionally when lack of progress is self-inflicted. I will die without changing my mind that we Palestinians can prove the doubters wrong.”