Actually, Fayyad steals a couple of lines, in an interview this week with AP’s Karin Laub in Ramallah.
The first is the one about not being an ATM machine [Fayyad did not, however, say “unfeeling ATM machine”].
Fayyad told AP, according to Laub’s report, published here, that “he would not serve as finance minister under a different prime minister, bristling at the idea of being kept on because of his strong ties to the donors. ‘That would not work … partly because it would most likely be seen as an attempt by our system to tell the world, here is a face that the donor community has been comfortable with, essentially looking at me more or less as the ATM’, he said. ‘I am not the ATM for the Palestinian Authority. I never was’, he said”.
The original, unforgettable ATM line is attributable to an Israeli official who was explaining, in June 2008, how angry his government was with Fayyad [politics are always personal].
Fayyad, at the time, had written letters to the EU and the OECD — in 2008 — urging them not to upgrade relations with Israel because of its continuing belligerent military occupation of Palestinian territory. The furious Israeli government ordered an examination of possible Palestinian debts to Israel that caused a delay in transfers of VAT and Customs tax to the Palestinian Authority [PA] — a classic go-slow action. According to Haaretz, the then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel [Richard Jones] asked what’s going on, and was told by officials in the Israeli Foreign Ministry that “they did not accept Fayyad’s ‘double standards’. ‘We’re not an unfeeling ATM’, one official told him. ‘We too are permitted to get angry when such scummy things are done to us’.” This unforgettable line is reported here.