JERICHO, West Bank -- A Palestinian official, just arrived with the new police force from Jordan, waxed eloquent on the telephone last week to his wife back home about life in Jericho.
"It's like heaven," gushed Abu Yassin. "Psychologically, it is poetry to be in my homeland.
"But we are living in hell," he admitted to her. "The weather is very bad. There is no bed -- I sleep on the floor. And to eat, I have to go out to pick fruit from the banana fields."
Such is the mix of emotions and complications that has marked the start of Palestinian autonomy in Jericho and the Gaza Strip. The first 10 days after Israeli withdrawal has served up a salad of close calls, doomsday predictions, angry threats and cautious whiffs of optimism.
Palestinian autonomy has gotten off to a predictably rocky start. There is little sign so far of a Palestinian government to replace the civil administration that left with the Israeli army.
The last Israeli paycheck to civil servants here runs out Tuesday, and no one has stepped in to pick up the payroll. Palestinian soldiers-turned-police still are trickling in from scattered bases in the Middle East, but they have no supplies and little equipment.
They have to borrow gas from Israel to put in their patrol jeeps, donated from the United States. When officers declared it unseemly for their men to take handouts of food from local residents, they had no other provisions. The Israeli army started slipping combat rations to the new arrivals.
And the designated leader of all this, Yasser Arafat, is sowing more chaos than control. He issues decrees and declarations that put the Israelis in a tizzy. At week's end, he still was in Tunis, Tunisia, trying to appoint a national council. Other Palestinian figures balked at joining their revered leader and sharing blame for the mess.
Surprisingly, it is Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who finds cheer amid this gloom.
It is "a good start . . . a good chance for the future," he said last week on a tour of the Gaza Strip. "Things were carried out in a much better way than I thought.
"I had deep fears about . . . the way things would take shape," he said. But "on the Palestinian side, a real effort was made to coordinate and understand."
The prime minister may have been practicing a little damage control. Public opinion polls showed a sharp dive in Israeli support last week for continuing the five-year autonomy process; 63 percent said stop now, according to one poll.
Israeli newspapers worked themselves into a froth over the first mishaps involving Palestinian police. Last Monday, a Palestinian soldier shot out the tires of an Israeli who ignored a checkpoint. On Tuesday, the new officers improperly arrested three armed Israelis. On Wednesday, a Palestinian private stopped at gunpoint an Israeli general. News photos showed Israeli and Palestinian soldiers faced off with guns, a hair-trigger away from an explosive disaster.
But the disaster did not happen. Nor did other dire predictions that autonomy would bring civil war among Palestinian factions, or a revolt in other areas, or a slew of fresh terrorist incidents. In all, last week, things were relatively quiet.
Israeli officials seem to have received orders midweek to be conciliatory. The Palestinians are new to the area, they said. They've been in the wilderness of Sudan, Libya and Iraq for three decades. The rules of autonomy still have not been translated into Arabic, so how could they know? the officials said.
In a background briefing to Israeli reporters, top Israeli army chiefs went out of their way to compliment the Palestinian police.
The crisp-uniformed Palestinians look smarter than the determinedly sloppy Israeli soldiers, admitted a senior Israeli officer, anonymously. And "when an Israeli brigade replaces another, it is much less organized than what we have seen so far from the Palestinians," he said.
Even Mr. Rabin lashed out more harshly at Israelis than Palestinians. He condemned "provocations" from "a minority of hard-core settlers, bent on disrupting the peace process" who would "exploit" the leeways allowed Israelis by the agreement.
But flattery and understanding could not hide obvious shortcomings in the Palestinian takeover. Although they have had eight months to plan their transition, the Palestinians have arrived with no mechanism to continue government services.
The Palestinians shunned any overlap with authorities from the Israeli occupation. Only last week did they call back to work 47 Palestinian clerks who had been in the tax collection offices before 1988, and asked them to try to figure out the computerized tax records Israel left behind.
Israel's civil administration said that it spent about $70 million a year on government services to the Gaza Strip and Jericho. With the additional cost of police salaries, the Palestinians may need three times that amount.
"The Palestinian national authority is in financial straits," lamented the Arabic daily Al-Quds. "Before the end of this month it has to have $20 million in Gaza and Jericho."
The Palestinians protest that international donors so far are deadbeats and have not backed up their pledges with cash. In part the donor countries are wary of handing over money to the historically corrupt PLO; in part they prefer financing concrete projects over daily expense vouchers.
"They are insisting on specific projects that they can put a plaque on, praising the donors. There is no money for operating expenses," acknowledged one Israeli official.
Because of these failings, some Israeli commentators declared last week that the whole thing won't work. Their fervor was
fueled by Mr. Arafat himself, who was heard on a May 10 tape calling for a holy war to regain Jerusalem and seeming to suggest that he will not honor the autonomy agreement with Israel. On Wednesday, he published a puzzling decree to cancel the post-1967 Israeli laws, a clear overstepping of his power.
"The question of whether Arafat indeed wants peace with us finally has been given a resounding answer: No," thundered an editorial in Israel's largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Ahronot.
The Israeli police minister and a top general threatened to send troops back into Jericho and Gaza. Mr. Rabin simply dismissed Mr. Arafat's declaration as nonsense.
"He's the master of survival but the builder of nothing, so far," Mr. Rabin said of the chairman.
The Israeli protestations were untainted by any acknowledgment mutual responsibility for the situation. For 27 years, Israel silenced, imprisoned or deported emerging leaders of the Palestinian people. As for facilities, Israel this month left behind equipment ranging from computers to telephones in some offices, but stripped others bare.
Israel, too, has been less than faithful to its signature, Palestinians complain. Israel has released fewer than 1,000 of the 5,000 prisoners it had promised to free promptly after May 4.
And Mr. Rabin has repeatedly warned that he will not carry out the second stage of troop withdrawal from the West Bank, required by the agreement with Palestinians, if he is unsatisfied by events.
Still, it looked likely that both sides would stumble through the mutual recriminations to reach some new accommodation. Neither has any choice, acknowledged Uri Dromi, the Israeli government spokesman.
"We can't make peace with the Swiss," he said Friday. "We have to deal with Arafat."