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Nathan Brown's appointment had another appointment.

The Palestinian researcher who was to help Brown during the latter's fact-finding trip through the West Bank couldn't make it, because he had been "asked" to appear at the Palestinian Authority's intelligence headquarters that morning instead.

This was one of many signs of the absence of freedom and transparency Brown witnessed while conducting first-hand research for a report on Palestinian institution building for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Brown had gone on a quest to discover whether the term "Fayyadism" -- named of course for the widely respected Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad -- is more than just a brand.

The answer: Unfortunately not.

"There was far more building of institutions under Yasser Arafat than there has been under Fayyad," Brown writes in his report, titled Are Palestinians Building a State? "It is true that many institutions were built in spite of Arafat and that Fayyad's behavior suggests a greater respect for rules and institutions. But that is consolation only for those who mistake personalities for politics. For all his admirable qualities, what Fayyad has managed to do is to maintain many of the institutions built earlier and make a few of them more efficient. But he has done so in an authoritarian context that robs the results of domestic legitimacy. In the long term, neither Fayyad nor his international backers are well served by ignoring the hollow nature of the current strategy."

That is quite an indictment. Brown -- no pro-Israel partisan himself -- goes so far as to castigate those who boost Fayyadism without truly understanding whether it even exists.

"The international infatuation with the effort obscures two extremely unhealthy developments, both of them tied to the schism in Palestinian politics -- the effort is predicated on the denial of democracy and human rights, and it is bypassing (and perhaps even enabling) the further deterioration in Palestinian institutions that lie outside of the realm of government," Brown writes. "The Palestinian political system is deeply troubled; Fayyadism does not address the crisis. At best it manages administration in the face of crisis; at worst it allows international and domestic actors to ignore it -- for now."

Brown delves into the multi-faceted fiasco of Fayyadism. But first, he defines Fayyadism as it is broadly understood: "if Salam Fayyad is prime minister, wealthy international donors will keep the PA solvent, pay salaries to its employees, fund its infrastructural development, and even put gentle pressure on Israel to ease up its tight restrictions on movement and access. Fayyad has become so indispensable to U.S. diplomacy in particular that there now seems a bizarre knee-jerk reaction to anything bad that happens in Gaza: delivering more money to Ramallah."

Fayyadism's failure illuminates the media's own. For his N.Y. Times column last week, Nicholas Kristof visited the Arabs of the southern Hebron hills. Kristof admitted that his trip was courtesy of B'Tselem, the leftist activist organization, and he made sure to follow the script.

In the Arab village of Tuba, "farmers seethe as they struggle to collect rainwater while a nearby [Jewish] settlement, Maon, luxuriates in water piped in by the Israeli authorities," Kristof writes. A shepherd complains to him they don't have enough water to drink.

Kristof doesn't seem to read The Jewish State, which is a shame. If he read Jacob Kamaras' June 25 cover story on water in the Middle East, he'd know the reason those Palestinian farmers don't have more water. The area around Hebron is a mix of Areas A, B, and C -- Oslo-era designations that delineate the governing authority and ground rules for residents of Judea and Samaria.

Area C, Kamaras wrote, is the only one in which Palestinians need to get approval for water projects.

Kamaras went on: "Until 2008, Israel approved 70 wells in the West Bank, but most were never drilled, Davidovich said... among the 35 [project applications] in area C -- the only area where approval is necessary -- 28 were approved but Palestinians never completed them, Davidovich said. Six of those 35 projects were never submitted for a license, he added."

When it came to water projects, Israel said yes; the Palestinian leadership said no.

Brown's report is a series of bubble bursting. He compares Fayyad's stated goals to what he has actually accomplished, and the reality is despairing.

There is no independent judiciary or separation of powers; security services are above the law; parliament is unaccountable and gridlocked; the teacher's union is "in crisis," and education policy consists of Hamas and Fatah purging their schools of each other's members and loyalists; Palestinian democracy "has simply come to an end"; "It is not clear if Fatah really remains a political party in any meaningful sense"; etc.

So what's the bottom line? "Palestinian authoritarianism in 2010 is different from Palestinian authoritarianism under Arafat -- it is less venal and probably less capricious. But it is also more stultifying."

But there is good news, in a sense. While Westerners continue to compose ballads to Fayyadism, Palestinians are apparently too cynical to fall into that trap. Evidence suggests that "U.S. leadership is confusing a useful individual with a sound policy," Brown writes, adding: "Nobody I met in Palestine suffers from the same confusion."

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.