Arafat Tells New Cabinet to Start Key Projects

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat established the first Palestinian government here Tuesday and immediately gave his Cabinet a list of priorities, including job creation, new housing and a massive cleanup of the Gaza Strip after 27 years of Israeli occupation.

Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said Arafat wanted not only to inaugurate the Cabinet of the new Palestinian Authority, agreed upon in negotiations with Israel, but also to launch key projects that could make a difference, and quickly, in Palestinians’ lives.

Among the decisions approved at the first formal meeting of the authority council were measures to build as many as 30,000 houses and apartments in the Gaza Strip with low-cost financing but private construction; to clean up Gaza, transforming it from a giant garbage dump into something safer and healthier, and to start a jobs program to tackle Gaza’s 80% unemployment.

Arafat--on his first day back in the West Bank since 1967--also ordered ministers to prepare annual budgets, to develop organizations for their departments and to review the complex network of military regulations the Israelis ruled with to see which should be dropped, modified or retained.

“We are starting to roll,” Shaath said after the Cabinet meeting. “Things will be difficult for a very long period--we know that--but the key point is that, for the first time in our history, we have our own government in at least a portion of our land. Secondly, we will take advantage of the momentum this gives us.”

Sworn in as chairman of the new Palestinian Authority, which will govern the Gaza Strip, the Jericho district in the West Bank and eventually the whole West Bank under agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Arafat said that he hopes the period of autonomy will bring the Palestinians to independence.

“The struggle must continue and this intensified work must continue until we establish our independent state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Arafat told a welcoming rally. “God willing, we will all pray in Jerusalem.”

Israel and the PLO resume their negotiations in Paris today on the next phases of Palestinian autonomy, including extension of self-government throughout the West Bank and national elections to be held before the end of the year.

Shaath said the talks, the focus of much of the Cabinet meeting Tuesday, should accelerate development of Palestinian autonomy by broadening the authority’s powers and hastening the withdrawal of Israeli forces from towns and villages in the West Bank.

“With this trip to Jericho, Mr. Arafat became even more dedicated in his commitment to the peace process and to his people,” Shaath said. “The Gaza Strip is now the place where the main effort must go for the million people living there. Jericho is symbolic, a symbol of the integration of Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

Also on the agenda is the issue of an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 Palestinian prisoners, especially Muslim militants, still in Israeli jails. “We say to our prisoners and our detainees, we tell them: ‘Patience, patience and God will help,’ ” Arafat said.

In taking the oath of office as head of the autonomy government, the 64-year-old former guerrilla commander, dressed in his usual olive-drab military uniform and checkered head scarf, placed his right hand on a Koran, Islam’s holy book, and swore to “do my duty faithfully and honestly.” He then administered the oath to 12 ministers.

The Cabinet is a mix of business people, politicians and academics. It includes one Christian, Tourism Minister Elias Freij of Bethlehem, and one woman, Social Welfare Minister Intisar Wazir. Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta group, assumed an advisory post on Jewish affairs.

But the start of the new government was far from perfect Tuesday. Of 24 members Arafat intends to appoint to his Cabinet, he has been able to fill only 17 positions. Of these, four were absent Tuesday.

Faisal Husseini, the most prominent Palestinian leader in the West Bank, declined to join the Cabinet formally and did not take the oath. He explained that he wants to be free to deal with the future of Jerusalem, perhaps the most sensitive issue in future negotiations with Israel, which has said he cannot be a Palestinian minister and operate in the holy city.

Arafat’s own arrival here was upset when rally marshals could not contain the small but unruly crowd, which broke down a double fence to get closer to him. The chaos grew when the crowd refused to heed calls to sit when Arafat spoke and even to remain silent so his hoarse, raspy voice could be heard. The 113-degree heat of Jericho, the lowest town in the world at 839 feet below sea level, caused dozens to faint.

Arafat and other Palestinian officials attributed the small turnout of fewer than 10,000--more people had celebrated through the night in Jericho in anticipation of his arrival--to blockage of the roads Tuesday morning by Jewish settlers, who battled Israeli troops and police in their effort to halt traffic into Jericho.

Settlers said they had cut roads at 19 points with human chains, stone-throwing and barricades of burning tires. There were delays, but police reopened most roads by midmorning.

“We wanted to stop the Arabs from coming through,” said Joel Adams, 29, a resident of the Mitzpeh Jericho settlement who manned a barricade on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. “We wanted to show the government we don’t want terrorists here. . . . This is a desperate means, obviously, (but) normal people live here--doctors, lawyers--and these are not crazy fanatics.”

But at the Jewish settlement Naama, north of Jericho, farmers continued working fields and vineyards, annoyed with protests and clashes between militant settlers and troops attempting to keep the road open.

“I have no problem with Yasser Arafat visiting Jericho,” Ilan Rosenblum said in Naama. “Let him live in Jericho, run his autonomy from Jericho. I am very much against the confrontations between the settlers and the soldiers. I think it only weakens our position.”

Arafat himself was in a “mood of nostalgia, a pensive mood,” according to Shaath, as the chairman flew on an Egyptian military helicopter from Gaza City north along the Israeli coast, then inland over Tel Aviv and north of Jerusalem to Jericho--a return to the West Bank after 27 years.

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said his government will push for peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbors despite the protests.

“With all the protests and with all the shouting, we will continue with the peace process,” Rabin told the country’s large trade union federation. “We got a mandate from the people, and we will go on with it.

“We want to continue the process, to continue to reach a reconciliation with the Palestinians, with Jordan, with Syria and with Lebanon, and for this purpose we are ready to take risks upon ourselves for the sake of great prospects.”

Dianna M. Cahn of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report from the Jerusalem-Jericho highway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.