BEGINNINGS:

Palestinians Demand New Cabinet Roster: Prime minister, bowing to lawmakers' calls to bar Arafat cronies, agrees to revamp the lineup. The debate spotlights a growing rift. (Laura King, February 23, 2005, LA Times)

Back in the era of Yasser Arafat, Palestinian lawmakers were inclined to rubber-stamp just about anything their longtime leader asked of them. Even if they didn't, the autocratic Arafat would simply ignore their wishes.

But this week, something unusual happened in the halls of the Palestinian parliament. Lawmakers rose up and vehemently declared they did not want corruption-tainted cronies of Arafat to serve in the new Cabinet.

On Tuesday, after two days of stormy debate, some of it held in the predawn hours, Prime Minister Ahmed Korei agreed to overhaul the Cabinet lineup. In a face-saving compromise, he told lawmakers he had decided to appoint technocrats rather than politicians to key posts and promised to present a new roster of ministers for approval as early as today.

Reform-minded lawmakers cheered the turn of events, even while warning that only the final outcome would tell whether things had really changed since the wheeler-dealer days of Arafat, who died Nov. 11.

"This is the beginning of what could be very good news," said Mustafa Barghouti, who ran for the Palestinian Authority presidency last month on a reformist platform. "It shows that people are really fed up with nepotism and corruption and are seeing how democracy can change that."