CAN A REBEL BE A RULER?

By LISA BEYER/GAZA STRIP

Thirty years as a revolutionary failed to wear down Yasser Arafat. One year as a pothole fixer has left him exhausted. While a leader in exile, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization maintained an air of triumph through highs and lows, flashing photographers a victory sign and a grin even in his most desperate moments. But now that Arafat is principally a governor and not a fighter, the effervescence has disappeared. On a recent evening, two senior aides found him so troubled by his burdens that he pleaded that they sit with him into the night. They stayed until 2:30 in the morning. "He's a very sad person these days," says an aide who meets Arafat weekly. "He conveys a sense of helplessness and becomes angry more quickly than before. He's becoming an old man fast."

That may sound like a strange observation at a time when Arafat looks poised to win an expansion of his authority. For the past year the Palestinians have enjoyed limited self-rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho. Now negotiators are scrambling to meet this week's deadline for an accord that would detail a timetable for Palestinian elections as well as a redeployment of the Israeli army in the West Bank. The original deadline for the new agreement was July 1, but that slipped to July 25 and may slip again. The killing last week of two Israeli hikers in the West Bank, presumably by Palestinian terrorists -- the first such murders in three months -- does not seem to have stymied the talks, however, and the two sides appear to be close to a deal.

Symbolically and economically, the West Bank is much more important to the Palestinians -- and the Israelis -- than is the Gaza Strip. Given the approach of this new phase of Palestinian self-determination, and given the wobbly but undeniable progress toward a secure peace that the Palestinians and Israelis have made since they signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, it might be expected that Arafat would display some joy and satisfaction these days. But he appears more fatigued than exhilarated, more fatalistic than hopeful. And the same can be said for his people.

To understand why that is so, and to get a sense of what the near future holds for the West Bank, one need only look at the experience of Palestinian self-rule so far. When Arafat entered the Gaza Strip, he and his aides raised expectations to an absurd height. The initial euphoria was sure to ebb, but Gazans could reasonably have hoped for competence and fairness, pride in their new government and a sense of momentum toward statehood. Instead they have seen organizational anarchy, corruption and autocracy. Meanwhile, the realization is sinking in that the Israelis will exercise some control over their lives for the foreseeable future. As they watch their cheap flags fly in faded tatters, many Palestinians would echo the words of one of Arafat's aides: "We have an emotional catastrophe here. So many of us went to jail, lost friends to the battle with Israel. We ask ourselves, If we are not truly building a decent state, why did we go to jail for this damn cause?"

It was obvious as soon as Israel and the P.L.O. announced the Oslo agreement that the main test for Arafat would be to transform himself from symbol-agitator-roving propagandist to ruler-conciliator-at-home pragmatist. A year after his return to his homeland, he is still struggling with the challenge. His brand of leadership remains better suited to an activist on the run than an administrator on the job. His strength is political theater, not practical policy.

To govern the Gaza Strip and Jericho, Arafat established the Palestinian Authority, patched together from previously exiled bureaucrats in the P.L.O. and from the organization's ranks of underground activists in the occupied territories. Israel has been stingy about relinquishing real power to Arafat-strictly controlling who and what go in and out of the self-rule zones-but on its own terms, the Authority, with its 18 ministers, 22,000 civil servants and 18,500 security personnel, has performed far less well than had been hoped, as Authority officials themselves acknowledge. "How can we convince people we are on the right path when we can't even create a sewage system?" says Justice Minister Freih Abu Middain.

As chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat hoards power in the same way he did as leader of the P.L.O., and the bottleneck of decision making at the top has helped create pervasive disorganization within his government. "There is an unbelievable amount of inefficiency," says a department head. "The norm is against working well." Arafat has also retained his habit of appointing at least two people for every task, so that no one rises too high and he retains power as the arbiter of conflicts. The results are incoherent policy and internal bickering. The chairman is notorious for playing his Planning Minister, Nabil Shaath, and his Economics Minister, Ahmed Qrei, off each another. "The enmity between them is startling," says an expert at the U.S. State Department.

Governmental appointments have been based largely on political loyalty rather than credentials. Arafat's brother-in-law is one of the new members of the Palestinian Higher Education Council. Some health-care professionals are outraged that Fathi, the head of the Palestine Red Crescent and the chairman's younger brother (and spitting image, sans beard and kaffiyeh), has been assigned a role encroaching on the turf of Health Minister Riyad Za'noun.

As a result of Arafat's administration, government services in many cases have deteriorated in the past year. A letter mailed within the tiny Gaza Strip now takes a week to arrive instead of two days. The phone system is a mess, because the Palestinian Authority has added twice as many lines as it was designed for. Building construction is so unregulated that Arafat's own Planning Ministry warns of a "forthcoming disaster''; the Authority manages to collect even less in taxes than the Israelis did, and the security forces especially have developed a reputation for petty corruption. A common complaint is that medical services have declined; Arafat's wife Suha won't give birth in the Gaza Strip -- she has flown to Paris to await the arrival of their first child.

The Gaza Strip is perennially poor, and the economy's biggest problem right now is that last fall, as a result of a series of Palestinian terrorist attacks, the Israeli government placed restrictions on trade with the territories and the number of Palestinian laborers who can cross into Israel each day for work. Nevertheless, Arafat and the Authority can still be held responsible for economic mismanagement. The Authority has failed to attract significant new investments, aside from those in construction made mostly by Palestinians. Infrastructure projects sponsored by international donors are under way, but disagreements over Arafat's loose accounting practices were the main reason for a long delay.

It is true that Arafat has begun to score successes in everyday governance that amount if not to nation building, at least to nation tending. The Education Ministry has built 250 new classrooms in the Gaza Strip, and half the schools there have been modestly refurbished. Palestinian TV has been broadcasting in the Gaza Strip since last year, and experimental programs began in the West Bank last month. In joint ventures with private investors, the Housing Ministry has put up 4,000 apartments in the Gaza Strip. The hospital in Jericho has been renovated.

All told, though, the Gaza Strip experience has not provided much inspiration to Palestinians in the West Bank as self-rule comes their way. They are likely in any case to be disappointed by the degree of self-rule they are allowed. Among Palestinians, the widespread expectation was that after the next phase of negotiations, Israel's occupation forces would make way for Arafat's army and police by pulling out of all Palestinian cities, towns and villages in the West Bank, remaining only in positions necessary for protecting Israeli settlements. But the Israelis say they will leave just four cities for now, and that further redeployments will stretch into mid-1997. Arafat's chief representative in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, has called the drawn-out scheme a "disaster" for the Palestinians.

The Americans take a very different view of the recent negotiations. "We are on the verge of a major step forward-the combination of West Bank empowerment, Israeli redeployment and Palestinian elections," says Robert Pelletreau, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. "Elections will be a major breakthrough." The timing of the elections is far from certain, however, and some Palestinians question whether they will be truly democratic.

Flawed or not, the agreement under discussion does illustrate one fact of overarching importance: the peace process continues. His administration may be a mess and the mail may not arrive, but Arafat has managed to keep the framework for talks intact, even though late last year they were at risk of tumbling down. For fear of igniting civil war when he arrived in the Gaza Strip, Arafat was at first permissive toward the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, and the much smaller Islamic Jihad, the two groups most militant toward Israel. But the soft approach merely emboldened the radicals, who committed a number of deadly terrorist attacks during the last three months of 1994. A double-suicide bombing last January that killed 21 Israelis convinced Arafat that further negotiations with Israel were impossible in an atmosphere darkened by terror.

"It was a real wake-up call," says a State Department official of the January attack. "We and the Israelis gave him that message very forcefully, and I believe some of his own people delivered it as well." In a tense meeting, says Secretary of State Warren Christopher, he told Arafat, "Look, if you don't meet Israel's security needs, you won't have peace, and you certainly won't have us." In April, Arafat extracted a promise from Hamas to forgo violence until July 1. He also set up special security courts and ordered sweeps in the Gaza Strip that netted hundreds of Islamic activists. The cease-fire held, and the stalled peace talks were able to go forward.

Arafat's success on the security front comes at the expense of human rights, which, according to a recent study by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, are in a "perilous state." The security forces are enormous, made up of the army, the regular police, the border police, the marine police, the regular presidential guard (known as Force 17), the alite praetorian guard, the civil defense force, military intelligence, general intelligence and the so-called preventive security apparatus. Suspects have been tried late at night, without the knowledge of family members or lawyers. So far, two individuals have died in jail, their bodies bearing signs of torture. Authorities have curtailed the free circulation of newspapers from time to time and detained a handful of journalists. Nevertheless, prison officials have allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross access to detainees, and the Palestinian Authority did license Hamas to publish a journal.

By avoiding disaster, Arafat has in his year of governing put an irreversible cast on the peace process and on progress toward true Palestinian independence, and that is surely a signal accomplishment. The Palestinians, however, are wondering what kind of society that independence will bring them. "I need to feel improvements in my daily life," says Nabil Abu Muaileq, a civil engineer in Gaza City, "not just see big leaders on TV talking about it." Hisham Saleh, a butcher in the West Bank city of el-Bireh, pauses from his work and says, "Judging from what's happened in Gaza and Jericho, I expect no improvement in our lives when the Palestinian Authority comes here."

To Saleh, Arafat is "just another Arab head of state, like the others, running a dictatorship, with his own clique surrounding him." Anyway, he adds, "our future is determined by the Israelis and the Americans, who believe the Palestinians should be quiet and not make trouble. Therefore, we are given a little thing and that's it." Saleh, however, is not angry; his voice is dispassionate, matter-of-fact. "We live from day to day," he explains, returning to his counter. "I'm not willing to exhaust my energies awaiting the fulfillment of high hopes." Such resignation may prove the salvation of Arafat. Unable to deliver his people more, he may find comfort in their realization that they must expect less.

--With reporting by Dean Fischer/Washington and Jamil Hamad/Gaza Strip

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON AND JAMIL HAMADI/GAZA STRIP