At 10th anniversary, a far poorer Palestinian Authority

The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, threatened to resign this summer, protesting the growing state of "chaos" in the PA. Across the territories, tensions have been building. In Gaza in July, thuggish young renegades of Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) abducted and beat his police chief, Ghazi Jabali, and continued the wreak havoc after Arafat appointed his nephew, who was widely rejected. Prominent Palestinian legislative council member Nabil Amr - a cabinet minister until last year - was shot in his own home in Ramallah, only an hour after he appeared in a television interview in which he was highly critical of Arafat. This strife, which largely has taken place inside Arafat's Fatah faction, is closely linked to the worsening financial squeeze, say some Palestinians and outside officials.

Since the World Bank and donor countries have put increasing pressure on the Palestinian leadership to institute a system of direct deposits, less donor money has been accessible to Fatah.

"Much of the tensions we're seeing are caused by financial stress," says a Western diplomat in Jerusalem.

Walid Masri remembers the first day he saw the Palestinian police stream through the dusty streets of Jericho, past the refugee camp where he spent his childhood. "When the Palestinian police first came, we felt a kind of safety and security. We could go out at night," he recalls.

Now, a decade later, he thinks of himself as someone who doesn't live under any government at all. "There is no functioning authority now. The Israelis come in and out when they want someone. Everything has come to a halt," says Mr. Masri, a waiter at the Mount of Temptation restaurant and tourist stop in Jericho. Masri, a father of five, has had almost no work since the intifada started. A place that once bustled with Christian pilgrims, the restaurant and gift shops only reopened a few months ago. It remains eerily empty, part of a minimall tucked into a hillside below the cable cars meant to carry visitors to the mount where Jesus was tempted.

Masri's boss, Maha Abdelrazak, says she and her husband opened up again after a four-year hiatus. But they only receive one or two buses a day, compared to the 30 to 50 they used to get at the height of the tourist season, pre-intifada.

"We wish we had saved some of the money from those days. But we just put everything we earned back to into the restaurant and kept expanding. We never thought they would close the doors on tourists," says Mrs. Abdelrazak, a woman with an warm smile. The restaurant, even at lunch time in summer tourist season, has nary a customer. Only when a bus rolls in, she says, do they flick on the lights - turned off to save on energy bills.

The PA has not tried to collect taxes from them at least four years, and there are not many services she can point to that she receives from the government. Yet she wishes everyone were a bit more patient. "People want magic to happen. People think that as soon as the PA is in place, all their problems should be solved," she says. "But no one's perfect. Ten years is not a long time for a country, for a government to give the people what they want."

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