Some Palestinians See End of Secular Dream

Many of those involved in Fatah's autopsy trace the decline to the creation of the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel and Arafat's return from exile with his legions from the Palestine Liberation Organization.

"These were freedom fighters, good boys, but they didn't know how to build a state," said Mohammed Milhem, a former member of the PLO's executive committee. "They deserved medals. But we needed the doctors, engineers and scientists."

Arafat filled the government with allies, many of them unqualified. Large economic concessions were awarded to his inner circle, and resentments grew -- particularly in the Gaza Strip, where the government took shape.

Hamas expanded its local charity networks in Gaza and built its military wing, which claimed credit for Israel's unilateral departure from the strip last year. It is now Hamas's homeland and a breeding ground for Fatah unrest.

Milhem, 76, was an accidental activist. Thirty years ago, he was drafted by his neighbors in the West Bank town of Halhoul to run for mayor. Israel was allowing local elections in the occupied territories, hoping that a new, more acquiescent crop of politicians would emerge as an alternative to the PLO-in-exile. Milhem was a popular teacher, head of the local sports club, chairman of the public library -- just the kind of résumé the Israeli government had in mind.

"I didn't want to run," said Milhem, who, in gray flannel slacks and an argyle sweater, resembles nothing so much as the high school chemistry instructor he once was. "You were either branded a collaborator or you resisted the Israelis and ended up in jail."

He won the mayoral race, and during his term in office built roads, schools, a city hall and a cold-storage warehouse for grapes grown in the hillside vineyards surrounding Halhoul. He said these works, which he can still see from his apartment window, represented the kind of constituent service Hamas has mastered and Fatah ignored.

After he was elected, Milhem and many other elected mayors declared support for the PLO, which Israel and much of the world then considered a terrorist organization. But his relations with the Israeli military governor were cordial -- until one day in May 1980, when Palestinian gunmen killed six Jewish settlers in nearby Hebron. Soldiers arrived at his house at midnight, and within hours he was on a military helicopter to southern Lebanon. He spent the next 16 years in exile, leaving behind a wife and nine children whom he saw occasionally in Jordan.

Milhem had met Arafat only once, but within a few years he was elected to the PLO's executive committee. Milhem served as the group's liaison to many foreign governments, even dancing with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher one evening in Brighton, England. He returned from exile in 1996, the year of the Palestinian Authority's first parliamentary elections.

Never a member of Fatah, Milhem says party affiliations divide people and distract them from the goal of forming a secular Palestinian state. Generational divisions within Fatah were apparent in his district, where Hamas swept the parliamentary seats in Wednesday's election, strengthening what he worries will be the extremes on both sides.

Already Milhem is watching his fears come true. He was shaken the day after the vote to see a Hamas supporter replace the Palestinian flag above the parliament building in Ramallah with a Hamas banner.

"These young Islamists think the movement for statehood started when they were born, started with them," Milhem said. "And that is disastrous."