From Rebels to Rulers

By Bruce W. Nelan

The cycle is horribly familiar. Israeli undercover agents in the Gaza Strip spring a trap on three members of the Fatah Hawks, an armed wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, killing Ahmed Abu Rish, 23. That ignites hair-trigger tempers in the occupied territories, and the rutted alleys of Gaza erupt into running battles between rock-throwing youths and Israeli forces. In one 24-hour period, soldiers kill a teenager and wound 65 Palestinians.

The violence leaps to the West Bank, where Palestinian gunmen open fire on Israelis parked on a roadside near Ramallah, killing a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher and a 19-year-old yeshiva student. Protesting Israeli settlers, who oppose the peace settlement with the P.L.O., take their turn building barricades and setting tires aflame, snarling traffic throughout the West Bank. A day later in Hebron, armed settlers, clashing with stone-throwing Palestinians, kill one and wound nine of them.

The new era in Israeli-Palestinian relations looks depressingly like the last one, filled with smoke and flame and gunshots. The agreement Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat sealed with a handshake on the White House lawn last September is supposed to change that. Next week Palestinians are to begin an experiment with self-government, and Israeli troops are scheduled to start withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area on the West Bank.

As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators struggled to settle their differences over security and border issues by Dec. 13, Rabin warned that meeting the deadline "looks difficult." Arafat, too, worried that the violence "could threaten the peace process." But, the P.L.O. chairman told TIME, "the process will go forward in spite of everything." Even if the beginning of Israeli troop withdrawal slips past the scheduled day, the hour when authority will be transferred into Palestinian hands is fast approaching. The most critical question now is whether Arafat and the Palestinians are ready to rule themselves.

P.L.O. leaders in Tunis are scrambling to police their volatile countrymen and firm up plans for the political and economic administration of the Gaza Strip and Jericho, the first territories they are to take over. Last week the mood at headquarters was subdued, reflecting concern among senior staffers that the organization is ill prepared to transform itself from a revolutionary cadre into a working government. Palestinians wonder among themselves if they are really ready. "We thought of everything except ruling," muses a senior P.L.O. official in Jordan. "I tell my colleagues that we need a transition period to prepare ourselves for a ruling mentality."

Part of this uncertainty is traceable to Arafat's autocratic leadership and his inability to share authority with subordinates. He has always conducted his organization's business literally on the fly, from capital to capital, in constant search of support. Now when he needs to settle down with voluminous reports on the structure of a new governing authority, he still prefers to be out of his office -- last week he toured Scandinavia -- and he does not delegate full decision-making powers to his aides while he is gone. In protest, two of his most trusted lieutenants, Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed Rabbo, boycotted an executive committee meeting last week, forcing Arafat to postpone it for lack of a quorum.

It was not a challenge to Arafat's leadership, P.L.O. officials said, but an attempt to make him share power. In a similar confrontation that began last month, his aides and foreign donors alike objected when he named himself chairman of the Economic Council for Development and Construction, created to administer the $2 billion in international aid pledged for economic development of Jericho and the Gaza Strip. To keep the planning on track, Arafat agreed to withdraw and give greater authority to economists and technocrats responsible for daily operations.

One important item was reportedly settled last week: the Palestinian National Authority, the board that will govern the Gaza Strip and Jericho until elections are held next year, is to consist of 20 members, 10 from the P.L.O. executive committee in Tunis and 10 from the occupied territories. Arafat will be chairman, but the other members have not been selected, and Tunis is filled with job seekers. Arafat also needs to fold in the leaders who have emerged in the territories, people like Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi.

Since rapid economic improvement is essential to winning broad popular support for the new Palestinian authority, the P.L.O.'s economic planners have drafted 2,500 projects ranging from a telecommunications system in Jericho to a $150 million airport in Gaza. Initial priority will be given to establishing an infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, which now lacks even the most basic services. Many West Bank Arabs fear that the endemic corruption of the P.L.O. will eat up large amounts of investment money. To reassure them, Arafat has agreed to call in an independent auditing firm to monitor spending.

But the most urgent order of business is establishing the Palestinian police force that is to take over most responsibility for security in the two areas. The first 22 Palestinian policemen crossed the border from Egypt to the Gaza Strip last month, and training of a 2,500-man contingent is under way in Jordan and Egypt. As many as 8,000 from the territories, including members of the Fatah Hawks, will make up the backbone of the force, which will be equipped with small arms and armored personnel carriers. The other 7,000 would come from the ranks of P.L.O. guerrillas now camped in several Middle Eastern countries. For the past two weeks, two senior P.L.O. officers have been in the Gaza Strip doing the groundwork for the force's deployment in cooperation with the Israeli army.

All of these new arrangements await the Israeli handover. Negotiations are making progress on some issues, but have run into major obstacles over security matters. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher is visiting the region this week, and that could encourage a speedy solution. He will talk with Rabin first and then see Arafat, probably in Tunis. If some details are still unresolved after he leaves the area, Arafat and Rabin are expected to take them up at their face-to-face meeting in Cairo on Dec. 12. That could be a chance for last-minute agreements to open the way for withdrawals to begin, at least symbolically, the next day.

P.L.O. officials say it is important to have at least some of the new security forces on duty by Dec. 13 to show Palestinians they have gained something tangible. The Palestinian police might also exert a calming influence on some of the violence that is shaking this extraordinary venture toward peace.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Dean Fischer/Cairo and Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem