National Agenda : Palestinians Can See a Future--and It Is Theirs : A government-in-waiting takes shape in Israel’s occupied territories, drafting initial policies and programs for self-rule.

Away from the angry confrontations with Israeli troops, far from the stalled peace talks in Washington, a Palestinian government-in-waiting is taking shape on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in anticipation of an end to Israeli occupation and eventual independence.

Hundreds of Palestinian professionals--physicians, lawyers, economists, engineers, agronomists and teachers--are planning the “Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority” that is to act as a transitional government from Israel’s military rule to what the Palestinians expect will be their full independence.

More than drafting tables of organization, however, they are developing the initial policies and programs a future Palestinian government will implement, a range that stretches from comprehensive health care to a new school curriculum, from an electric power grid to reclamation of farmland.

And in a few areas, through community organizations and with foreign financial assistance, Palestinians are already taking charge of some of their own affairs by operating eight universities, providing technical advice and marketing assistance to thousands of farmers, constructing low-cost housing and establishing a development bank.

“Israelis like to say that we have no plans, that we are not competent, that without their military government all will be chaos in Palestine,” said Sari Nusseibeh, who is coordinating the planning effort. “We think we will be more than ready. Even now we are trying to synthesize the sector-by-sector planning and produce an overall (plan) for Palestinian self-government.

“Our teams are not people who speak in slogans or write political tracts,” Nusseibeh added. “They are hardheaded realists, educated, experienced specialists, and the work that they are doing is focused, specific, detailed and highly professional. Are we where we need to be? No. Will we be ready? Yes. And what gives me that confidence is the tremendous progress we have made in the year since we began and the dedication of the people involved.”

Formed as technical teams to advise the Palestinian delegation in the talks with Israel, the 30-plus committees have as their initial mission telling the negotiators what to ask for and what to reject, pointing out where seemingly technical matters could undercut or strengthen the transitional government and the hoped-for state.

“Nothing probably would seem more technical, less political than electrical power,” said Mazen Husni Rasekh, chairman of the power committee, “but it is crucial to our economic independence and will be a central element in the negotiations.

“Already, the Israelis are trying to reserve energy, like security and foreign relations, as an area where they retain control. There are specific questions, such as who will supply power to Israeli settlements on the West Bank or the future of the substations that Israel built. But the fundamental issue is who controls the power supply, as that controls our development.”

Scores of such issues are arising as the advisory teams map out strategies to ensure that the transitional government has the authority it needs and that any future state is truly independent.

“We will have to have some very hard talks about who owns the land,” said Ismail Daiq, the head of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. “Agriculture will be the core of our economy, and Israel has taken over a lot of land and removed even more from cultivation. We need to get this land back and to put farmers on it again.”

And economists and businessmen are concerned about what Hisham Khatib of Jerusalem’s Economic Development Group calls “a fair relationship,” which will require Palestinian-Israeli agreements on taxation, banking, customs regulations and import duties, among other issues.

“If we ignore these questions, we will face problems in the future,” Khatib said. “The negotiations must focus, first of all, on the political questions, but agreement must be reached on many other points if the political settlement is to succeed. . . .

“We are not negotiating on equal terms, however, for Israel has a fully constituted government capable of making such far-reaching decisions. Our teams are far from government departments, but they are having to assume such responsibilities.”

Israel has a parallel but separate planning process under way. The Industry and Trade Ministry, for example, is trying to develop plans for a customs area covering free movement of goods between Israel and a self-governed Palestine, which is likely to have far lower tariffs; it is also trying to draft tax laws and banking regulations that would continue the present economic union.

Most of the Palestinian teams, which now involve more than 400 people, have moved several steps beyond advising the negotiators and are laying out policies for the transitional government, programs to implement them and the organizational structures--the future ministries and departments--to carry them out.

“We quickly saw that we needed our own view of the future, that we needed to decide how we wanted to develop,” said Nusseibeh, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated professor of philosophy. “Policy planning is not, we understood, the drawing up of programs for transport or health care or education.

“There has to be a vision, and then there has to be a mechanism to achieve those goals. We started from the very beginning with surveys of what exists in every area, assessments of what is needed, evaluations of various development models to see what is suitable for us--a thorough consideration, in short, of where we want to go and how we want to get there.”

Important decisions that will likely shape any future Palestinian state are emerging from this process, and many of the advisory committees, most of which now have their own networks of subcommittees, are the likely precursors of the departments that would make up a transitional government.

“This is a serious attempt by Palestinians to create institutions that will assume power,” said Hanna Siniora, the influential editor of the daily Jerusalem newspaper Al Fajr. “The Palestinian-Israeli negotiations will determine the character and form of the transitional authority, but Palestinians need their own institutions with their own policies; otherwise, we will simply be administering the Israeli occupation.”

Palestinians abroad have undertaken similar planning projects over the years, and the Palestine Liberation Organization financed extensive research on issues that would face an independent Palestine.

But Hisham Sharaby, now a historian at Georgetown University in Washington and former member of the PLO’s planning center, described those efforts as “inevitably theoretical and speculative exercises.”

“We have no blueprint, no plan in hand,” Sharaby said in an interview from Washington. “Only after the Palestine National Council approved the idea of coexistence with Israel and the establishment of a separate Palestinian state did concrete thinking begin, and that largely within the occupied territories.”

Nusseibeh, who teaches at the 20-year-old Bir Zeit University, recalled how he had gathered fellow Palestinian intellectuals and professionals, many of them returned from working in the Gulf states, to begin the planning before the Madrid conference that launched the Middle East peace talks last year.

“When I got them together, I told them no one would pay them, they wouldn’t get on television and they probably wouldn’t get government jobs,” Nusseibeh said. “Most likely, they would be thanked and quickly forgotten, but they might also go to prison. I had my heart in my hands.

“But there was an immense readiness of these people to participate in this planning process, and for the first time in the occupied territories Palestinians undertook a broad, targeted effort at planning their nation’s future. . . .

“This is not a paper exercise,” Nusseibeh added, angered by mocking articles in the Israeli press and stung by the cynicism of some Palestinians who see the effort, like the Washington talks, as leading nowhere.

“We hope, in fact, to begin implementing some of the plans even as negotiations continue. Our people have needs now, and we will be seeking foreign assistance, technical and financial, to put many programs into operation.”

The education committee, for example, is working on what Naim Abu Hommos, secretary general of the 15-year-old Palestine Council for Higher Education, called “a national curriculum,” which will break sharply from the Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian materials now in use.

“Nothing is more crucial in nation-building than education,” said Abu Hommos, whose doctorate is from the University of San Francisco. “In the schools, values are learned systematically and human resources are developed, and so the character of a modern nation is formed. . . .

“We also need to assess our needs--no new schools are being built although our population grows at 4% a year--and we need to decide how to organize the Education Ministry. . . . When we talk about self-government, we mean it to be real self-government.”

In agriculture, land reclamation, greater self-sufficiency in food and development of export crops emerged quickly as priorities. But the committee, taking a hard look to see what would be profitable, decided not to promote farming in the arid Gaza Strip, to focus on Arab rather than European markets in vegetable export and to subsidize the infrastructure that will enable fast but economical growth of farming--but not to underwrite low food prices.

In planning the future Agriculture Ministry, the committee decided that it should be kept small to minimize the bureaucracy and that farmers unions, cooperatives and agricultural schools organize the extension services that will advise farmers and help market their produce.

“The state can help, but it more often harms agriculture,” said Daiq, a Soviet-trained agronomist. “In trying to work out a new structure for Palestinian agriculture, we do not want to reinstate what we had under Jordan or Egypt, let alone keep what we have under the Israeli occupation. Holland has a better model for us, we believe, in its minimal government role.”

A similar philosophy characterizes the advice that the Economic Development Group gives not only the negotiators but Palestinian businessmen and foreign donors.

“We say, ‘Look beyond the occupation and see if a project still makes sense,’ ” Khatib said. “Everything will be different, and we have to examine the economy sector by sector. Drawing up a fresh economic policy is very complex.

“In manufacturing, for example, we hope to be free of the 110% duties Israel imposes to protect its industries, but we will lose the comparative advantage we have of cheap labor when there will be competition from Jordanian and Egyptian factories. What we gain may be offset by what we lose, and a lot of projects that look good now won’t survive . . . Overall, we feel that we should not try for explosive growth, making up for 25 years in two or three. We need quality projects and solid growth, even if it is slow. And we should use our own resources as much as we can and not borrow--we don’t want the Palestinian state to be born in debt.”

Planning is handicapped, however, by a lack of basic data. Faisal Husseini, the head of the Palestinian negotiating team, complained recently that Israel has refused to provide any information on the budget of the military government or tax collections.

“We can’t even get census data,” Husseini said. “The Israelis challenge us to come up with a plan for water management without telling us what the water resources are. They have the data, but it’s all classified secret.”

The technical teams have nonetheless been able to collect much information from Palestinians employed by the Israeli administration, from diverse public sources such as satellite photographs and from their own on-the-ground surveys.

To assess the generating capacity of the small municipal power plants on the West Bank, the British-trained Rasekh visited each one, finding most out of commission and some beyond repair. To get figures on current power usage, he collected electricity bills from all over the territory.

That was difficult, he said, but “the numbers are real.” Harder was the task of projecting economic development, particularly industrial growth, and estimating the number of exiles who might return.

“We finally were able to plot the curves to the year 2010,” Rasekh said in his office at An-Najah University in Nablus where he directs the new computer center. “On that basis, we could plan for the transition period, for the new equipment and plants we will need and for the long term when we establish the Palestine National Grid. Now we are looking for candidates to go abroad for training.”

The whole planning effort, however, has not been without controversy. Intense Palestinian rivalries have led to boycotts of the committees by supporters of groups opposed to the peace talks and sometimes to the establishment of competing groups--there are at least four groups on health care and perhaps a dozen involved in economic planning.

“Institution-building has taken a wrong turn with institutions being formed at a delirious rate without any real justifications for their existence,” Hisham Awartani, an economist at An-Najah University and a member of the Economic Development Group, wrote in the newspaper Al Quds. “The major weak point of Palestinian institutions is that they adopt a factional or personal viewpoint, or both, from the outset. . . . This has angered the average Palestinian who is now worried about what this will lead to if occupation ever ends.

“The average Palestinian understands, even enthusiastically accepts, the multi-party system and the multi-ideology system because it embodies real democracy, which the Palestinians believe in and would like to practice. It would be nice if various factions could compete in an accepted, civilized manner to reach the minds and hearts of the citizens and then participate in our legislative organs according to their real weight.”

Samir Abdullah, an economist from An-Najah and a member of the delegation from the pro-Communist People’s Party, complained recently that the committees were made up almost exclusively of supporters of Fatah, the mainline PLO group, and this had effectively “paralyzed” them. Still, the People’s Party declined another invitation to join the planning process.

And Husseini himself set off a row when he said plans were being drawn up to recruit, train and deploy Palestinian police. Political rivals voiced fears that the force would be used against them, and some newspapers complained that one thing Palestinians did not need was more police.

Israelis look at such highly combative politics and disparage the planning effort as existing only on paper.

“Israel’s assessment is that the myth of ‘national institutions,’ supposedly built during the course of the intifada, has been shattered among Palestinians themselves,” Avital Inbar wrote in the Israeli business newspaper Globus. “In terms of practical ability to receive power, the Palestinians are helpless, and they are starting to acknowledge this. . . .

“The Palestinians officially declare they have no desire to receive assistance from Israel in any economic or administrative area. They want to construct an advanced model, akin to the Israeli example but detached from it. . . . But their declarations have no practical implementation.”

Laurence Khair, chairman of the Palestine Housing Council, disputes that. His year-old group has $36 million from the European Community for 1,200 low-cost apartments, each selling for about $30,000, and expects to start construction in early spring provided he gets the necessary building permits.

“This is very real,” the 39-year-old, French-educated architecture professor said. “Some of the designing is well advanced, architects are being qualified for the competition and so are contractors, financial arrangements are being made, land is being sought.”

Although the apartments will meet less than 1% of the housing needs for Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Khair sees it as a first step toward formulating a national housing program.

“We want this to be a model project, not just in terms of design and construction, but socially as well,” he said. “We want to make sure the apartments go to those who need them most. This is a question of trust between us and the people.”

Siniora, the editor of Al Fajr, is confident that not only the housing project but the whole Palestinian planning process will meet this test of popular acceptance.

“For real democracy in Palestine, we need to spread the authority--this is something Palestinians feel strongly about,” he said. “But we are doing this in the technical committees because hundreds and hundreds of people are involved in formulating the plans and policies.

“I have no fear that we will not be able to use power. We will make mistakes, to be sure, but we will be OK.”

Potential Power

Here are three Palestinians who would probably hold key positions in any independent state: Faisal Husseini Sari Nusseibeh Hanan Ashrawi

Charting the Possiblities

A new Palestinian goverment might be broken down into three sections. The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s executive committee might provide the overall authority, with the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks probably assuming key positions. The committees would become ministries. PLO executive committee Palestinian delegation to the peace talks: Faisal Husseini, head of the delegation, could be nominal president. Technical committees: Sari Nusseibeh, deputy head of the delegation, could be prime minister.

Committee In charge Status of work Health Dr. Arafat Hidmi advanced Agriculture Ismail Daiq moderate Energy Mazen Husni Rasekh advanced Education Naim Abu Hommos advanced Water Khader Shaqair moderate Industry Kamal Hassouneh beginning Transportation Fakhri Tannib beginning Housing Lawrence Khair advanced Police Mustafa Adawi beginning Religious Affairs Saad El-Din Alami moderate Information Hanan Ashrawi moderate Tourism Sami Abu-Dayeh moderate Communications Naem Tobassi beginning Economic Development Hisham Awartani moderate Archeology Walid Sharif beginning Commerce Haseeb Nashashebe beginning Culture Ibrahim Karaen moderate

Source: Hakam Fahoum / Jeruselem Media Productions