It was an unexpected scene: The man known as a boring technocrat was bringing a crowd to its feet, cheering.

Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, was clad in his usual dark grey suit and blue tie. He could have passed for a bank manager in Fredericton, but he was in this West Bank village that butts up against the Israeli security barrier, wowing a crowd of 500 people.

He's a secular person - his only known religion is economics - but he opens his 15-minute remarks with the classic Islamic salutation "in the name of God ..."

What he's preaching is hardly religious but it's nothing short of revolutionary: "Next year," he tells his cheering audience, "we will declare our own state."

The man, whom the Bush administration insisted be made the Palestinian Authority's finance minister in 2001, is determined that if a Palestinian state doesn't emerge from negotiations with Israel, the PA will unilaterally declare a state on whatever territory it controls in the West Bank. Furthermore, it will ask the United Nations Security Council to accept it as a state, including the territories it claims in the West Bank and east Jerusalem that still are occupied by Israel.

In the meantime, Mr. Fayyad is busying himself, putting flesh on that skeleton state and developing the institutions that will sustain it.

Nation builder

He began by instilling law and order through newly trained security forces, and now is moving out into the communities and organizing economic development.

The 58-year-old economist is not championing a violent path to independence. On the contrary, Mr. Fayyad has never held a gun and has never been arrested. He is advocating a non-violent popular resistance and his message is being embraced.

The people of Bilin welcome it. For five years they have attempted, through demonstrations and other peaceful means, to wrest back from Israel the farm fields and olive groves they lost when the concrete security barrier was erected to separate their Palestinian community from a fledgling settlement called Modiin Ilit (now a community of 40,000 ultra Orthodox Israelis).

The message of non-violent resistance is also welcomed by interested foreign entities, several of whose representatives are in the crowd for the Fayyad speech. "It feels like the world is with us," the Prime Minister says, acknowledging their presence in the crowd.

"It's refreshing," says Christian Berger, the European Commission representative, "to hear such an upbeat message."

"I have my doubts that he'll succeed," says Mark Heller, principal research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. "But Fayyad's the first guy not to just whine about things; he's doing something positive. I applaud him."

"The power centres in Israel have no idea how to deal" with this man, wrote Akiva Eldar, a Haaretz columnist. "In the mid-1990s, when Fayyad was appointed International Monetary Fund representative in the territories, no one imagined he would one day become a key political figure in the West Bank."

Israeli President Shimon Peres knows how to deal with him: He likens him to David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, who also went about building a future state's institutions while under occupation.

Yossi Alpher, a former senior official with Mossad and past director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, says that in the absence of a negotiated arrangement, "Salam Fayyad's unilateral state-building plan is the best option available," and he calls on the United States to embrace it.

Man of the people

But success, Mr. Fayyad knows, will only come from popular support, not from preaching to the choir. That's why, most days, you'll find him in the towns and villages up and down the West Bank speaking to small groups, opening new institutional projects.

"We recently opened our 1000th new project," he says, "in Qalqilya," a West Bank town not far from his birthplace.

By August next year, Mr. Fayyad says, the number will be up to 2,000 and the state will be ready.

"We have to turn hope into willpower," Mr. Fayyad says, "and the concept will become reality. It's all about empowering the people."

That's what brought him recently to Jiftlik, a town of 5,000 in the Jordan Valley, where he opened a new irrigation and greenhouse project for water-starved farmers.

After speaking to the small crowd in the presence of a German cabinet minister whose government had put up much of the money, the Prime Minister stopped by a farmhouse to hear about other local concerns.

One man pressed a piece of paper into Mr. Fayyad's hand and explained it was an order from Israeli authorities to evacuate the home he had built for his expanding family - it was scheduled to be demolished. Could Mr. Fayyad do something? "I will see what I can do," he said.

But there are limits to Mr. Fayyad's powers. He runs a government in the midst of a Swiss-cheese assortment of jurisdictions. The Palestinian Authority has control over several built-up areas of the West Bank that contain more than half the Palestinian population, but only about 17 per cent of the territory known as Area A. He has partial control, shared with Israel, over Area B, which contains another 40 per cent of the population and about a quarter of the West Bank.

But it is Israel that has control over the almost 60 per cent of the West Bank known as Area C, and it was in Area C that this Palestinian farmer built a home for his family.

Almost all the fertile Jordan Valley falls into Area C. Israel says it is for "security reasons" since the area adjoins Jordan. But lush Israeli date and banana plantations run the length of the valley. Mr. Fayyad is worried about it staying outside his future state.

"We need that land to settle the people who one day will return," he says, referring to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in other countries.

The price of independence

Mr. Fayyad has come a long way, and not through a conventional freedom-fighter route.

He and his family were never refugees, and he was in university in Texas when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was coming into its own. He was dean of economics at the University of Jordan when the first intifada broke out in 1987, and was at the World Bank in Washington in 1993 when the Oslo accords was signed on the White House lawn.

When Mr. Fayyad became the PA's finance minister in 2001 it was to please the international community: There was someone in the Arafat administration they could trust with the money. He had two big problems: gaining the confidence of the political parties and the community.

He did it, says pollster Mohammed al-Masry, a former Fatah intelligence official in Gaza. "It took a while, but he won both groups over," he says.

Now the people are embracing his state-building initiative. "They trust him," Mr. al-Masry says. "He's modest, he listens. And his non-violent approach is the key," he explains. "People are fed up with the violence and the fighting between the parties."

Not everyone supports the initiative.

Hani al-Masri, a Palestinian professor and columnist from Nablus, says "Fayyad's success in improving security and the way of life has come at a high price: It's covered over the reality of occupation."

Hamas supporters agree. "Ending the occupation has to come first," says Samira Halayga, elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council from Hebron and a member of the Islamist Reform and Change party. "Otherwise, the territory of the state will be too small."

It's also possible, she says, that "Israel will simply destroy these institutions as they have in the past," a reference to the operation against the Palestinian Authority in 2002 during the second intifada.

"It's ironic," Ms. Halayga says, "that Hamas got 74 seats in the PLC, and Salam Fayyad's party only got two. Yet it's Fayyad's government that harasses and arrests Hamas members. Which way represents the will of the people?" she asks rhetorically.

Mr. Fayyad makes no apology for the arrests. "Those people arrested have been arrested on security grounds," he insists. "No one has been arrested simply for being a member of Hamas."

As for his initiative, the Prime Minister thinks it can be "a unifying force," reconciling Hamas and Fatah, the party of president Mahmoud Abbas.

"We can all agree on having a state and the institutions that would make it run," he says.

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