In Arab gloom a light shines from West Bank

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Transcribed from the clipping

RAMALLAH, West Bank — In 2002, the U.N. Development Program released its first ever Arab Human Development Report, which bluntly detailed the deficits of freedom, women's empowerment and knowledge-creation holding back the Arab world.

It was buttressed with sobering statistics: Greece alone translated five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic; the GDP of Spain was greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined; 65 million Arab adults were illiterate. It was a disturbing picture, bravely produced by Arab academics.

Coming out so soon after 9/11, the report felt like a diagnosis of all the misgovernance bedeviling the Arab world, creating the pools of angry, unemployed youth, who become easy prey for extremists. Well, the good news is that the U.N. Development Program and a new group of Arab scholars last week came out with a new Arab Human Development report.

The bad news: Things have gotten worse — and many Arab governments don't want to hear about it. The whole report would have left me feeling hopeless had I not come to Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian government in the West Bank, to find some good cheer. I'm serious. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider Middle East what off-Broadway is to Broadway.

It is where all good and bad ideas get tested out first. Well, the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund economist, is testing out the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever. I call it "Fayyadism."

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

A syndicated opinion column. No masthead, no folio, no printed date; date is label-only. There is no deck. The byline runs as a photograph of the columnist with 'THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN' reversed out of a black block beside the first paragraph — a standing column signature, not a conventional byline line.

Tagline at the foot: 'Friedman writes for the New York Times.' The column's premise — that a reporter comes to Ramallah and finds 'good cheer' in Palestinian governance — sits oddly beside the same columnist's frame, which treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as 'off-Broadway' to the Middle East's Broadway and Palestinian rights as a distraction from institution-building.

The lede, the Fayyadism paragraph and the two Fayyad quotations were transcribed from magnified crops; the remainder was read at page magnification.

Cite this clipping

"In Arab gloom a light shines from West Bank," Wisconsin State Journal, 8 August 2009. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2009-044. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2009-044