Anger at Arafat Reflects a Political Shift : Mideast: Palestinians preparing for self-government question the role and autocratic style of the PLO leader.

Resplendent in its gilt frame, the large oil portrait on the back wall of Wahid Shakaa’s popular coffeehouse deep in the casbah of Nablus is of a smiling Yasser Arafat, wearing his trademark black-and-white headdress arranged to fall as the map of Palestine.

Shakaa put up the picture of the “president of Palestine,” as it proclaims Arafat, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization concluded their agreement in September on Palestinian self-government; the coffeehouse’s habitues had toasted the PLO chairman warmly.

But Arafat’s picture is no longer the object of veneration, a political icon revered by Shakaa’s clientele. Instead, it is a target of angry, often fierce criticism as the men drink their coffee, play backgammon and debate the events of the day.

“Who is Yasser Arafat?” a middle-age merchant demanded, drawing calls of assent from around the room. “Where does he come from? Who are his family? Who are his uncles? Who is this Arafat?”

In Palestinian society, such questions are insultingly put to suggest that a man is a social upstart and a political pretender, that he is without family or clan, without community standing, without a real place in the history of the people.

The frequency with which these and similar questions are being asked in the coffeehouses of the West Bank and Gaza Strip reflects a major political shift under way among Palestinians: Arafat is losing popular support at a speed and to a degree that will make it difficult for him to govern once the terms for autonomy are agreed to with Israel.

“Palestinian society is politically volatile, and today it is swinging hard against Arafat,” an official from Fatah, Arafat’s mainstream faction in the PLO, said at a weekend celebration here of Fatah’s 29th anniversary. “The intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and the youth have always been fickle, but now our masses are swinging against the old man too. It’s bad.”

For Arafat, this has the potential of a major crisis.

In recognizing Israel and agreeing on self-government for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arafat effectively abandoned his power base for the last three decades--Palestinians in refugee camps, in guerrilla units and in PLO structures abroad--and adopted as his new constituency the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Yasser Arafat is welcome home--as a refugee,” said Hassan Ziad, 29, a resident of the Balata refugee camp here. “But as a ‘hero’ he should maybe stay in Tunis (the PLO’s Tunisian headquarters). Palestinians have fought to govern themselves, not to have this old man come back after so many years outside the country and tell us what’s what.”

The criticism of Arafat is harsh and wide-ranging, reflecting real doubts about Arafat’s ability to lead the Palestinians through the period of self-government to the independent state they hope for.

His critics assert that:

* Arafat is an autocrat, deciding things alone, frequently rejecting colleagues’ advice, often ignoring the facts of a case. He rides roughshod over the PLO Executive Committee and its policy-making Central Council and does not understand that Palestinians want a democracy. Petitions are circulating demanding democratic reforms--or Arafat’s replacement.

* Arafat is appointing cronies to key posts in the Palestine National Authority, the new government, and passing over many from the communities here, many of whom had led the intifada, the rebellion against the Israeli occupation, and many of whom are better-educated and more experienced. Several Gaza leaders have quit their PLO and Fatah posts in protest.

* Arafat has done nothing to halt the corruption believed rampant within the PLO and has yet to account for tens of billions of dollars given the organization by Arab governments and contributed in “taxes” by Palestinians themselves. Western countries have pledged extensive assistance but are hesitant to provide it without strict controls.

* Arafat is mishandling negotiations with Israel, both before and after the agreement on self-government, giving too much away on crucial issues such as the future of Jerusalem and then turning too tough in an attempt to win back what he lost. The erratic bargaining has delayed Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho district in the West Bank.

“The mood is very bad, and, rightly or wrongly, people tend to blame Arafat and to dump everything on his head,” Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, a leading Palestinian intellectual, said in Jerusalem. “Arafat is our leader--we have said so now for almost 25 years--and so on him are focused our hopes, our fears, our frustrations, not just our achievements.”

The severe political malaise can be measured in the massive drop of support, from 65% to 42% between September and December, for the PLO agreement with Israel on Palestinian autonomy, according to opinion surveys conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies.

Many Palestinians attribute the sour mood to the failure to realize the great expectations that came with the autonomy accord.

“We haven’t tasted this ‘peace’ that Arafat has given us,” said Nasser abu Arafeh, a regular at Shakaa’s coffeehouse. “More than three months later, what do we have? A few prisoners released, a few men back from exile, a cease-fire that breaks down each day, and what else?”

In the last month of negotiations with Israel over implementation of the accord, Arafat has sought to show that he is a tough bargainer and, thus, a shrewd leader. He has sought maximum concessions and has been willing to go to the brink, to bluff, to ignore commitments made by PLO negotiators and to create deadlocks to get them.

Yet Palestinians here are far from admiring.

“This is just so much playacting,” said Riad Malki, an engineering professor at Birzeit University who is prominent in the opposition Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “Having made the deal, Arafat has to carry through, and everyone, the Israelis and the Palestinians, know that. We think it was a bad deal, and we are not impressed by Arafat’s efforts to make it less bad.”

Much of the current anger is personalized, directed at Arafat, just as the jubilation had been in September.

“Arafat has been found out--the negotiations with Israel have shown him to be a man who knows how to order and dictate but not how to negotiate and conciliate,” declared wall posters put up in the West Bank town of Ramallah by the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Ziad abu Amr, another Birzeit professor, observed as other intellectuals have: “We are not sure that the PLO leadership is capable of making the philosophical and intellectual shift from running a national liberation movement to running a civil society.”

And five of the wealthiest Palestinian businessmen told Arafat in a strongly worded memorandum that he must abandon the “revolutionary mentality” and democratize the PLO--or see the failure of this historic chance at achieving Palestinian independence.

“Decisions have been made haphazardly; appointments have been based on connections, loyalty and forced obedience, not on qualifications, expertise and knowledge,” they charged, accusing Arafat of “being satisfied with one opinion and turning a deaf ear to others.”

Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the respected Gaza physician who had headed the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace talks in Washington, led a delegation to PLO headquarters in Tunis recently in an effort to persuade Arafat to share decision-making, to commit himself to national elections this summer and to appoint the best-qualified people regardless of political affiliations.

Abdel-Shafi got a polite hearing from Arafat but nothing more, according to Palestinian sources in Jerusalem, and that is likely to enrage--and enlarge--the dissident movement in the PLO’s ranks, particularly in the Gaza Strip.

“This is a crisis of confidence both of the man and of the system,” said Manuel Hassassian, a political scientist at Bethlehem University, “and it arises because the transition we are going through requires fundamental changes in the PLO and our whole political structure. . . . Given the character of Palestinian society, its essential pluralism, its desire for such institutions as a multi-party political system and market-led economy, the PLO has no other way except to democratize, to elect its leaders and to make fundamental decisions openly with full national participation.”

Until Palestinians are able to hold national elections, Hassassian contended, they do not have--and have never had--a mechanism to reconcile political and social differences.

“Our society is full of actual and potential conflicts today,” Abdul-Hadi said. “We have different political factions--those that support the peace process and those that oppose it, those that want a secular state and those that seek a pan-Islamic nation, those who are Marxists and those who are social democrats, those who have lived under occupation and those who have lived in exile.”

The list goes on, because there are strong differences between Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, among Palestinians from the West Bank towns of Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, among the major Palestinian clans and, increasingly, between generations of activists.

For many Palestinians, this diversity argues for an open political system based on pluralism. That demand began almost a year ago with calls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for major reforms within the PLO.

“What has happened to democracy?” Tawfik abu Khusa, a Fatah cadre member at the Arab Journalists Union in Gaza, asked last month as he and others protested Arafat’s recent appointments there and called for broader participation in local politics. “The leadership won’t be able to rally the people behind the PLO with the faces it has chosen. Democracy is not top down, but bottom up.”

But since he assumed leadership of the PLO in 1969, Arafat has always centralized decision-making, securing his hold on power but also minimizing the movement’s tendency to fragment.

“The leadership has shoved aside the people who have struggled and who have sacrificed for the cause,” Zakaria Talmas, another leader of the intifada in Gaza over the last six years, complained as he too quit to protest Arafat’s approach. “We refuse to have leaders who lived in five-star hotels eating fish and chocolate while our people starve. The real leaders are those who are in the field, not at the swimming pool, who got their education in prison, not on the boulevards of Paris.”