COLUMN ONE : ‘Capital of Floor Sweepers’ : Jordan is groaning under the weight of 300,000 Palestinians displaced from Kuwait. Their plight hasn’t elicited much sympathy or aid, and jobs are all too rare.

Saleh was once a janitor in a bank in Kuwait, but since being driven from his home in May and arriving in Jordan, he has been unable to find a replacement for that job, low-paying as it is.

“Even bankers are willing to take a job as a janitor,” Saleh said. “Everyone is willing to sweep floors. Right now, Jordan is probably the world capital of floor sweepers.”

This kingdom is groaning under the weight of the influx of more than 300,000 Palestinians who have fled Kuwait and settled in Jordan, the only country that accepts them. The exodus represents the biggest flight of Palestinians since 1967, when 400,000 fled warfare in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, now occupied by Israel. It is the third time in almost 44 years that masses of Palestinians have been displaced and forced to wander following a major Middle East conflict.

Technically, the Palestinians are not refugees because they hold Jordanian passports--although many of them have not lived here for years. Some of them were even born in Kuwait.

In every other way, they resemble typical victims of conflict: They have lost their homes and livelihoods and have poor short-term economic prospects. Many live on handouts.

The influx compares with the 350,000 Soviet immigrants who have settled in Israel during the last two years. Israel’s economy is, per person, nine times wealthier than Jordan’s, and Israel has received $400 million in cut-rate loans guaranteed by the United States to house the newcomers. Israel is asking for help to borrow another $2 billion a year in each of the next five years.

Despite their comparable numbers, the Palestinians have won relatively little sympathy from the United States or the world community, much less from the wealthy countries of the Middle East. The Palestinians, along with their self-proclaimed leadership in the Palestine Liberation Organization, are stained with their choice of the losing side--Iraq--in the Persian Gulf War.

“We have gotten a little money from Japan and Germany and some relief agencies,” said Taher Masri, who until recently was Jordan’s prime minister. “But the Americans have said no to loans or grants, and there doesn’t seem to be money elsewhere.”

Kuwaitis charged the Palestinians with aiding Iraq’s lightning takeover of their country. The PLO and its erratic leader, Yasser Arafat, embraced Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and chose not to condemn the invasion.

Early in the occupation, some Palestinians took public pleasure in the humbling of the wealthy Kuwaitis and expressed resentment over the way Kuwaitis had treated them over the years. Many Palestinians also belittled the opportunity afforded them to work in the emirate.

These enormous missteps cost the Palestinians dearly. Saleh--who hopes to return someday and who asked that his full name not be used--lived in a modest but comfortable six-room flat in Kuwait.

He, his wife and five sisters are now crammed into two rooms in a damp first-floor apartment in Zarqa, north of Amman. Everything smells of mildew. Some of the furniture has been retrieved from a garbage dump. They live off $100 a month provided by a PLO-backed committee that provides funds for the neediest of the refugees.

“We only give money to the most needy. Otherwise we would soon run out,” said Mohammed Milhem, a Palestinian who heads the PLO relief committee.

Wealthier Palestinians have found shelter with relatives or in summer homes they built here in better days.

Work, rather than housing, is their main problem. Palestinians are scrambling to find what jobs they can, regardless of their previous profession. Computer experts have become bag boys at the Amman Safeway, accountants are working at gas stations, physicians are waiting on tables.

Faisal abu Shaker, an oil engineer who lost his job in June, sweeps the garage of an auto repair shop in Suweilih, a large Palestinian enclave near Amman. Without relatives in Jordan, he, his wife and four children have wedged themselves into a small apartment with roll-away mats for bedding and a folding table to dine on.

“I consider myself lucky to have escaped Kuwait,” said Abu Shaker, who added that he was fired shortly after the war ended. “Here there is no work, but in Kuwait, there is no safety.”

Maher Fakri owned an appliance shop in Kuwait that he sold “for pennies” when he left in September. He has yet to find a job and was even turned down when he tried to apply for work at a local market to load vegetables on trucks. “They thought my hands were too soft to do this kind of work,” he recalled.

“We have rather well-qualified manual labor,” added Zakaria Zarek, who was a banker in Kuwait but has been unemployed for six months since he was deported from Kuwait.

The refugee influx has added 60,000 students to Jordan’s school system and boosted the unemployment rate from an already hefty 30% to 35% of the labor force. About two-thirds of the Palestinians fled Kuwait before the American-led counterattack; the rest have come since the war’s end and in the wake of Kuwaiti reprisals, which reportedly included mass dismissals from work, arrests and torture.

Milhem estimates that about a third of the Palestinians are penniless while many of the rest are living off accumulated savings. “Every day that passes is another day that people are running out of money,” he said.

The Palestinian expulsion and the hair-raising stories brought by the refugees have changed many Jordanians’ appraisal of Iraq’s performance in Kuwait. During the occupation, Palestinians who were reluctant to cooperate by going to their jobs were mistreated by the Iraqis. Palestinian accounts of Iraqi looting shocked the Jordanians, who had thought such tales were products of American propaganda.

“We have awakened our friends and family to reality,” said Zarek, the banker. “They thought the invasion of Kuwait was an heroic thing. We told them it was brutal.”

Difficulties in absorbing the refugees have become a factor in Jordan’s enthusiastic embrace of the Middle East peace talks. Like Egypt more than a decade before, the government of Jordan’s King Hussein is giving priority to economic development and has reached the conclusion that growth can come about only with genuine peace, including peace with Israel. “Open borders, less tension--this is what we need to attract investment,” Masri said.

The new arrivals are a potential strain on the delicate ethnic and political balance in Jordan. Palestinians, who over the years fled the territory that is now Israel and the West Bank, make up at least half of Jordan’s 3 million citizens. The rest are “native” Jordanians, including desert communities of Bedouins. The 10% addition to Jordan’s overall population has given rise to calls for a limitation on the numbers of newcomers so that “pure” Jordanians will not be overwhelmed.

At least another 30,000 Palestinians who are originally from the Gaza Strip are stranded in Kuwait. Before 1967, the strip was administered by Egypt. After the Gulf War, the Egyptians, out of a mixture of spite and an unwillingness to add to their own impoverished population, refused to take in the former Gazans. The Gaza Palestinians can go nowhere else--Iraq won’t let them pass through its territory, and Jordan does not want more refugees. It is not clear that Israel would let many return to Gaza, itself a fetid array of refugee camps.

About 40,000 of the former Kuwait residents are eligible to go to hometowns in the West Bank, and a few thousand have. But many more are reluctant because of the economic hardships in the Israeli-occupied territory, which is still in the throes of an uprising against Israeli rule.

Israel is unenthusiastic about a mass return because it is trying, through a program to settle Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza, to reduce the population advantage of Palestinians in the occupied lands. In the Middle East peace talks, the Israelis have opposed turning over the territory to the 1.7 million Palestinians living there.

“We are interested in having the lowest number of refugees coming here,” an Israeli occupation official was quoted in Jerusalem Magazine.

The author of the article added: “A possibility that especially worries Israel is the formation of international pressure on Israel to open its gates to Kuwaiti deportees.”