Fight Heats Up Over Jobs in Palestinian Territories : Transition: Competition is fierce for posts in Gaza, West Bank. Many see chance of a lifetime--and power.

The knock came about 1 a.m. at Sari Nusseibeh’s home in the East Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis. The men outside identified themselves as guards from Fatah, the main faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and said PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had sent them to protect Nusseibeh from death threats.

But at 6:30, the bodyguards bundled Nusseibeh into a car and drove him to the Allenby Bridge, where he crossed into Jordan; he was whisked to Amman’s airport and flown to PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, to meet Arafat.

There, Nusseibeh was given a job he did not want but almost everyone in the PLO did--managing the Palestinians’ new economic development agency, which will funnel foreign assistance to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Sari now has a hundred new enemies among those who wanted that job,” a Palestinian businessman, a close friend, said as he recounted Nusseibeh’s virtual abduction early this month. “He probably needs the bodyguards now.”

With appetites whetted by prospects of power and profits, Palestinians are scrambling for key jobs in the transitional authority the PLO is establishing to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as Israel pulls back from territories it has occupied since 1967.

“There are six candidates, at least, for every position,” said Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace talks and newly designated PLO envoy to the United States. “The competition is very, very sharp. . . . These are opportunities for which people have waited a lifetime, and it does not fall to many to participate in achieving their nation’s independence and establishing the state.”

But the idealistic “desire to serve” that drew Ashrawi out of Birzeit University on the West Bank, where she had taught English and comparative literature, is not the only element prompting the flood of applications to PLO headquarters in Tunis.

“Some people feel that they are owed jobs because of their years in the struggle, their time in prison, their suffering,” said Dr. Zakaria Agha, Fatah leader in the Gaza Strip. “Others are put forward by their parties, their factions, with political claims to be represented. Some, we fear, see a lot of money to be made, and they want to cash in.

“Everyone, in short, seems to be looking for a job now that we are getting close to power,” he said. “In Tunis, the faxes are piling up, and the dossiers are growing into mountains on the desktops there. Our travel agents can’t get enough seats for all the people who want to go to Tunis personally. Even at my clinic each morning, there are as many job-seekers as patients.”

In Gaza, the more ambitious job-seekers also have sometimes wound up as Agha’s patients as different PLO factions have ambushed and assassinated candidates from rival groups.

“We are getting our country back, at least we are at the start of the process, and all sorts of people are claiming what they believe to be their share,” Hanna Siniora, longtime editor of the now-defunct East Jerusalem newspaper Al Fajr, said as he contemplated his own future. “Would-be politicians, but people we had never heard of, are seeking jobs; businessmen are seeking contracts, and the men with guns are available for hire now that we have a cease-fire with the Israelis.”

The positions run the governmental range--Palestinians will take over most civil functions from the Israeli military administration in early spring, besides assuming full authority in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho district on the West Bank in January.

Plans for the rapid development of the Palestinian economy, itself a major victim of the long Israeli occupation and the rebellion against it for six years, will create even more jobs for professionals, many of whom built up the economies of the Persian Gulf countries over the past 25 years.

The applications come from: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem, colloquially known as “insiders”; from Palestinians living in neighboring Arab countries, and from others scattered around the world in the Palestinian diaspora--they are known as “outsiders.”

But all fear that PLO apparatchiks, particularly Arafat loyalists in Fatah, will get the key decision-making posts even though after years in exile they probably lack the professional qualifications and hands-on experience that many other candidates can offer.

“There is a place for the politician, just as there is a place for the technocrat,” Ashrawi said. “What we are trying to do, however, is identify the tasks, define the position, outline the qualifications--all without mentioning names--and then seek candidates from inside, from outside, from the PLO. We know there will be compromises, but we hope they will be, well, rational.”

Nusseibeh, 44, who had been teaching philosophy at Birzeit until he was asked two years ago to coordinate planning for Palestinian autonomy, had foreseen this period as one of intense infighting and had decided to take a long-offered fellowship in Washington to avoid it.

In a two-page letter he faxed to Arafat in Tunis, Nusseibeh expressed his loyalty to the PLO chief and promised to work for the movement in the future but explained his intention to take up the fellowship; with that, he went home to pack for Washington, where he had already rented a house and sent his wife and children.

But even before Nusseibeh could take the telephone off the hook in Abu Dis, Arafat called and gave him “a military order” to come to Tunis, friends said.

Brought to Arafat by the Fatah guards, Nusseibeh was told that his arguments had failed and he would be deputy director general--the real, day-to-day manager--of the development agency, which already has commitments of $2 billion.

“Although Arafat is the fund’s overall chairman and Abu Alaa (Ahmed Suleiman Khoury, the senior PLO economist) is its director general, Nusseibeh has the key executive position,” an East Jerusalem economist said.

“The reason Arafat insisted on Nusseibeh is that Sari sincerely did not want the job. Nusseibeh has not made a single cent from his work for the Palestinian cause and cares so little for money for himself that he is always broke. . . . With everyone grabbing for power, Arafat finds those who refuse it all the more trustworthy.”

Tension over jobs has been mounting within the PLO and between the PLO and “insiders” on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and stems, Ashrawi said, from “the sudden change in roles and tasks” that has come with the formation of the transitional government.

“For a long time, the effort was to get recognition and acceptance of our national movement as legitimate,” she said. “As we form our first governing national authority, we have to make a massive mind-shift to transform what we have talked about into a reality. . . . There will be much competition in this adjustment, and there will be pain.”

Nusseibeh was not alone in trying to back away from a period of conflict, rivalry, score-settling and crass opportunism.

No sooner had Israel and the PLO signed the September accord on autonomy than Dr. Mamdouh Aker, a delegate to the Washington peace talks, announced he had resumed his medical practice and put a notice in local papers about his clinic hours. Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a retired physician who served as the delegation chairman, returned to Gaza and his office at the Palestine Red Crescent Society there. Other delegates to the Washington talks are preparing to resume their university teaching posts.

“There is a natural temptation to remain involved on a full-time basis because the future is being shaped and each of us has ideas about it,” said Ghassan Khatib, another Birzeit professor who was a delegate from the pro-Communist Palestinian People’s Party to the Washington talks. “But we can also contribute in the commissions and task forces that will be formed and in the elections planned for next summer.”

Ashrawi, 47, had talked of returning to the classroom but hoped for a policy-making role in social affairs in the transitional authority. “The action is here,” she said, seated in her office at Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters in East Jerusalem.

When Arafat offered the prestigious post of PLO representative in Washington, Ashrawi hesitated for nearly a month before--over the opposition of her husband, Emile, and daughters--taking it. “There will be action there too,” she added, a bit wistfully.

BACKGROUND

Despite the enormousness of creating virtually a whole government where none has existed, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat has made relatively few appointments so far--the board of the Palestinian Economic Development and Reconstruction Agency, the director of Palestinian television, representatives to head the newly opened Fatah offices on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and delegates to negotiations with Israel. Speculation, thus, abounds on whom he favors for what post. A pro-Jordanian newspaper, An Nahar, caused a scandal last month when it printed what purported to be a list of those who would be appointed to key posts; not only was the list bogus, it appeared to be deliberate disinformation, setting one faction against another.