Ramallah, West Bank: Palestinian elections are scheduled to be held in less than three months, but the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Salam Fayyad, is not concerned about running for office.

Rather, he has set his sights on a longer-term platform: establishing a Palestinian state by 2011 — a goal he outlined recently in a clear, well-organised booklet titled Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.

"All I'm campaigning for is the two-year statehood programme," said Dr Fayyad. "The idea is unabashedly that two years down the road, we will have something that will look like a Palestinian state."

His two-year plan that many would deem unreachable seems to be a riff on the famous quote from the 1989 baseball movie Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come."

"If we don't build it, who will?" asks Fayyad. "We want to build an infrastructure that will aid in ending the occupation," he says.

A former senior official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Fayyad came onto the Palestinian political scene, somewhat reluctantly, by agreeing to become Yasser Arafat's finance minister in 2002.

At the time, the Palestinian Authority was mid-intifada and mired in corruption. Fayyad's international credibility and economic expertise helped pull the PA back from the brink.

Nuts and bolts

Now, he wants the PA to focus on the nuts and bolts of state-building, from schools and sewage to building new cities and affordable housing in the West Bank.

His plan, laid out in a succinct 50 pages, has become Fayyad's calling card, and is full of objectives that seem as optimistic and positive as Fayyad himself. But the plan is already raising eyebrows in Israel, drawing criticism for its call to unilateral action in disputed territory.

The plan calls for Palestinian building in "Area C" — a West Bank area populated by Palestinians but designated as being under Israel's security control by the Oslo Accords. Fayyad makes no apologies for that. If Israel can build on the land over which it is supposed to be negotiating, so can Palestinians, he says.

"They say it's unilateral, to which I say, ‘yes.' This is something I confess to. It's effective unilateralism," says Fayyad. "There is another brand of unilateralism exercised by Israel, which is called colony building. What I have here is an agenda of creating positive facts."