WHEN Salam Fayyad resigned on April 13th as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, it was taken as yet another blow to what, by dint of repetition rather than accurate philology, is referred to as the peace process. Mr Fayyad—former IMF official, holder of an MBA and a PhD in economics and one-time employee of the St Louis Federal Reserve—was a man with whom Western diplomats and donors felt comfortable. He dismantled the PA’s militant bands and rolled out eight new battalions of Jordanian-trained forces. He restored law and order to cities which had crackled with gunfire since the onset of an armed intifada in 2000. Thanks to the dissolution of parliament, he ruled by decree.

Flush with funds from donors, Mr Fayyad was able to give Palestinians some of what they want. Standards of living improved. Former fighters evolved into bureaucrats with laptops, iPhones and new cars bought on credit. Amid the growth, the gap between the living standards of Palestinian and Gulf Arabs narrowed a bit. Now that Mr Fayyad’s staff are packing their boxes, some worry over how long the security and foreign funding that pays for their salaries will survive. One Fatah stalwart called his downfall a victory for petty infighting; another said it was a strategic mistake.

For all the Palestinians’ economic gain, the land they can call their own has shrunk, as Jewish settlements have grown. Across large tracts of the northern parts of the West Bank, where the settlements are rarer, Israeli-Palestinian tensions are lower. But where the two sides come face to face, clashes are common. In mid-April masked settlers from Ofra, a once-docile settlement north of Ramallah, the PA’s seat, wielded crowbars on an old man whose nearby hill they coveted. In the neighbouring village of Silwad mobile homes belonging to settlers were burned in response, prompting soldiers to open fire. Down the road at Jalazoun refugee camp, settlers and Palestinians stone each others’ cars.

Under a new Israeli defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, who suppressed the latest intifada , which subsided by 2005, army officers have warned that they will stop protests with lethal force. Bullet casings are scattered at the entrances of villages that have long been quiet. Israel can contain unrest with its network of village informants, its secret police and night detentions. But, unless it is comfortable with using such tactics indefinitely, some other solution must be found.

One of the biggest obstacles to peace is the division between Fatah and Hamas, which thrives by painting the more moderate Mr Abbas and his PA as stooges of Israel and America. A truce between them is overdue. As the overseer of the cities of the hilly West Bank since 2007, Mr Fayyad waged, to Israel’s delight, a fractious contest with the Islamists of Hamas who rule Gaza on the coast. Without Mr Fayyad, President Mahmoud Abbas could yet implement a deal, long in abeyance, to form a unity government with Khaled Meshal, who recently won a new mandate as Hamas’s boss. If Mr Fayyad’s exit accomplishes that, it may turn out to be as big an achievement as anything he managed in power.