ROAD TO MIDEAST PEACE : Ex-Gunmen Seek to Reinvent Selves as Candidates : Politics: Palestinian guerrilla groups scramble to create parties, devise platforms. Elections are scheduled to be held after Israeli troops redeploy.

In smoke-filled offices and coffee shops across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, onetime Palestinian guerrillas are struggling to remake their liberation movement into political parties capable of competing in elections.

Thursday’s White House signing of the latest Israeli-Palestinian accord unofficially launched the first Palestinian campaign to elect a self-governing authority. The accord both extends Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and lays out rules for holding elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

With elections expected within six months, guerrilla groups that for decades measured their strength in the number of gunmen they could command are now scrambling to select candidates to run for the 82-member self-governing council.

Before the Palestine Liberation Organization abandoned its pledge to liberate Palestine by fighting Israel and then signed a peace accord with the Jewish state two years ago, the refugee camps of the Middle East were the scenes of important power struggles among the PLO’s many factions. The camps produced the angry young men who could be counted on to raise a faction’s profile by carrying out murderous attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Now, the only struggle that counts is the one for the right to provide civilian services to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and to participate in the final phase of negotiations with Israel due to begin in May.

Palestinians are acutely aware that the factions that boycott these elections--or make a poor showing once they decide to participate--risk becoming a footnote to history.

Everyone believes that Fatah, the largest, best-financed faction, will dominate the elections, and that Fatah founder Yasser Arafat will easily win election as head of the new Palestinian council. But smaller factions and independent candidates hope to secure enough seats in the council to stay relevant as Palestinians fashion a state out of the autonomy Israel has granted them.

“There is a lot of internal debate within most factions about the elections,” said Mamduh Aker, an activist in Fatah. “Within this debate are emerging new, more realistic parties that are trying to form brand-new platforms.”

Even those who oppose the September, 1993, Oslo accord--as the first Israeli-PLO agreement is known--concede that these elections are the only game worth playing in Palestinian politics. The Marxist factions and the militant Islamic movement Hamas are engaged in fierce internal debates over how they can field candidates in an election that they officially reject because it implies acceptance of the Oslo accord.

“Hamas rejects Oslo and everything that comes as a result of it,” said Sheikh Jamal Saleem, a Hamas activist in Nablus. “But elections, freedom of choice, political pluralism and the freedom of people to choose their leaders through elections--Hamas wants this system.”

Ultimately, Hamas and the Marxist parties--the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--may not enter the race as parties but may choose instead to back candidates known to sympathize with their views.

Outside observers and Palestinians expect the field to be flooded with independent candidacies. There may even be some rivals to Arafat running for the separate position of head of the executive authority. Voters will cast two ballots, one for head of the authority and one for representatives to the council from their district.

The Palestinian election law bars any candidate or party espousing racist views or acting in “an illegal or undemocratic manner.” But Israel dropped its demand to specifically ban Hamas or to require that anyone who runs publicly accept the Oslo accords. Fatah is hoping that Hamas and the leftist parties will find some way to participate, to give greater legitimacy to the elections.

Opposition parties are not the only ones struggling to cope with the new reality that the anticipation of elections brings.

For 30 years, Fatah was the single most powerful force in Palestinian politics-in-exile. It is the backbone of the Palestinian Authority that began running Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho in May, 1994. The faction is determined to emerge from the elections with a firm majority on the new council.

But the transition from guerrilla group to political party has plunged the faction into its most serious crisis since Arafat founded it in the 1960s. What served as the source of Fatah’s strength in exile is now making it difficult for it to become a political party, activists say.

“Fatah was formed to achieve the liberation of all of Palestine through armed struggle,” said Hussam Khader, a Fatah leader in the tough refugee camp, Balata, that lies on the outskirts of Nablus. “We don’t have a social program in Fatah. We don’t have a political platform. Fatah exists as an emotional coalition and as an important entity for this transition period.”

Fighting for Palestine was the motherhood-and-apple-pie issue for Palestinians for decades, Khader said. Fatah’s commitment to liberation and vagueness on all other issues made it possible for Palestinians from all walks of life to join. The movement was ruled autocratically by Arafat, and its leaders were selected by him, not by any grass-roots structure.

Now the faction must produce both attractive candidates and a platform for them to run on. But Fatah’s broad-based membership means that important Palestinian families, Fatah apparatchiks who served Arafat for years during his exile, local activists who fought the Israelis during the Palestinian uprising and Johnny-come-latelies are all vying for seats on Fatah slates.

The movement launched what was billed as the first of a series of conventions Wednesday in Gaza aimed at producing a Fatah leadership in each district, elected by local Fatah activists. But no one is sanguine about the prospects for the conventions settling the issue of who should get a position on each Fatah slate.

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“Right now, these elections look like they may end up being Fatah against Fatah,” said Nader Said, head of the survey research unit at the Center for Palestinian Research and Study in Nablus. “In most areas, the real competition is going to be among the various factions of Fatah, between those who were a fundamental part of Fatah and those now aligning themselves with Fatah because they think it is the party with the best chance of winning.”

Said commented that in Nablus “the conflict within Fatah is already immense.” Rival Fatah gangs have taken to kidnaping each other’s members, calling rival commercial strikes and parading through town, displaying their weapons--a throwback to the politics of the refugee camps.

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Aker, the Fatah activist, brands Fatah’s infighting as an unseemly display by the faction that can rightfully claim credit as the liberator of the Palestinians. “[Its adherents] are not struggling over competing visions of how to build the country; they are fighting to get different posts in the government,” Aker said. “They want to get a piece of the cake, but there is no cake. They are fighting over crumbs given to them by the Israelis.”

Far removed from the fiery, sometimes violent power struggles within the factions, European Union representatives, international organizations and other interested states are quietly working throughout the territories, trying to educate both the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian public on the responsibilities of democracy and the how-tos of holding an election.

“There are many, many questions out there and very little information,” said Lucy Nusseibeh, administrative director of the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Elections, a nonprofit group.

Funded by a Canadian grant, the center is conducting a series of town hall-type meetings in West Bank villages, camps and cities to try to answer people’s questions.

“There is really not very much understanding about the rights and responsibilities attached to democracy and how democracy is not just the holding of elections,” Nusseibeh said. “Among the older generation, there are a lot of people who ask: Why should we be interested in democracy? or who say: Isn’t Islam and democracy mutually exclusive?”

The center’s message, Nusseibeh said, is that no matter how flawed this campaign may be or how limited the authority the council will wield once it is elected, “this is a chance for Palestinians, and people should participate.”