Even before it got started, the new-old US diplomatic strategy for Palestine risked coming undone. The resignation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad strikes at the heart of the Obama administration’s still-evolving plan to showcase the economic development of the West Bank to promote diplomatic progress and demonstrate the advantages of the Ramallah model over the one led by Hamas in Gaza.

How can Washington showcase the merits of economic assistance to the PA when Fayyad, whom they pressed to remain in office, has thrown in the towel in despair? With Fayyad, the US-led donors are comforted that they have “one of their own” — a Western-educated administrator and technocrat schooled in the language and practice of international development, in the Muqata. He makes the trains run on time, or would if the Palestinians had any trains, and he keeps his security forces fed and functional. Without him at the helm of the newly transparent but broke PA, Washington risks losing the European donors who already have an advanced case of donor fatigue and Congress, which has found in Fayyad the only Palestinian they love to love.

Fayyad has resigned, but he remains a caretaker until PA President Mahmoud Abbas can cobble together a replacement. Indeed, Fayyad has been a caretaker since Hamas’ ouster of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Elections have not been held in the PA for seven years, when Abbas was elected and Hamas candidates won the Parliament. Everyone, from Abbas on down, is serving without a legitimate popular mandate. Fayyad might yet be convinced to remain, despite the almost open revolt among Fatah leaders, if only to give the Obama administration yet another opportunity to improve what Secretary of State John Kerry has termed, without any apparent irony, Palestinian “quality of life” under occupation.

Kerry is not the first US secretary of state to adopt such a program. In December 1983, Secretary of State George Schultz urged then Prime Minister Shimon Peres “to improve the Palestinian quality of life.” The Reagan administration was still singing from the same songbook in 1987, despite the outbreak of the first intifada only days earlier. “We want to improve the Palestinian quality of life,” explained a top State official to Congress on Dec. 14, 1987. “Practical measures to improve the daily lives of Palestinians help to reinforce efforts toward a comprehensive political settlement while reducing the frustrations that are one cause of extremism and violence. Active efforts for peace and improvements in the quality of life are therefore essential to each other.”