Freed Palestinians Count Blessings, Tribulations : Mideast: Israeli peace gesture stirs joyous reunions--and memories of what are seen as injustices.

The women were weeping at Jumma’s house, deep in the Palestinian refugee camp here, and so was he. But the tears this time were those of joy, for Jumma had returned from an Israeli prison.

“To be home, nothing is so sweet,” Jumma said. “My mother, my sisters, my father, my brothers, none of us could stop crying for the joy of being back together.”

Jumma, like others interviewed, requested that his last name not be used.

A year and a half earlier, his relatives wept too--but bitterly, as Jumma, now 19, was taken away by Israeli soldiers and convicted in a military court of demonstrating against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison deep in the Negev Desert.

“We cried not only because they were taking him away so unfairly but because we know what can happen to a man in those police stations and prisons,” said his older brother, Sayed, 23, who himself has been imprisoned three times. “You cry because you know that you may never see your brother or son or husband again, and that, when you do, he may not be the same.

“You cry for your family, and you cry for your nation. So much suffering, so much suffering.”

Jumma was among the more than 600 Palestinian prisoners who received early releases last week as part of a goodwill gesture intended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government to promote the Arab-Israeli peace talks.

“A month they cut off--I hope that is not the extent of their goodwill,” said Samir, 20, a neighbor in the Kalandia refugee camp northeast of Jerusalem who was arrested and imprisoned with Jumma. “The Israelis said they were freeing those who had completed two-thirds of their sentences and were not involved in any big violence, like deaths. But the reality is that they are freeing us small fry who have just a few weeks to go.”

Still, the gesture has had an impact as hundreds of Palestinian families on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip welcomed home their young men. Jumma’s father slaughtered a sheep in celebration, and the party turned into an event for the whole neighborhood.

“Maybe, just maybe, we are coming to peace,” said Umm Nabil, two of whose sons returned to their home on the outskirts of Jerusalem last week. “You see those boys walking down the street, home at last, and your body surges with hope.”

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Her sons, now 20 and 22, were convicted of stoning Israeli soldiers and burning cars in the course of the intifada , the Palestinian rebellion against Israeli rule. They were sentenced to three years in prison, then were released three months early.

“But we don’t trust Israeli words--let them change the way they act,” said Umm Nabil. “I hope we are seeing such a change now, but these ‘gestures’ of theirs are really small.”

Besides promising to free 800 Palestinian prisoners, about 10% of those now held, the Rabin government has canceled deportation orders against 11 prominent Palestinian activists, has begun opening some of the West Bank homes and other buildings sealed during the intifada , and has started to remove barricades that closed hundreds of roads in the occupied territories in retaliation for the unrest.

“Things are returning to normal here, and we want to encourage that process,” Col. Moshe Elad, the military governor, said last week as his troops removed the concrete-filled barrels that had closed the road between Bethlehem’s main square and the town’s busy market. “We think that if we show goodwill, the residents will respond.”

But the Israeli moves, characterized by the Rabin government as “confidence-building measures,” have elicited a mixed reaction among Palestinians: Some are seen as simply righting wrongs that Israelis are deemed to have committed in cracking down on Palestinian activism; others are regarded as too small and marginal to represent real change. And most are met by suspicion.

And that reaction upsets Israelis, who expected the gestures to be appreciated for the goodwill they represent--and to be reciprocated in a more relaxed Palestinian stance at the Arab-Israeli talks under way in Washington. Rabin, complaining that the Palestinians have taken a tougher line at the Washington talks, said last week that “for a time” there will be no further confidence-building gestures in the occupied territories.

“We do appreciate the gestures, because they mean Israel is reorienting itself toward peace and because they remove some of the hardships from our lives,” said Jumma, seated in the living room of his family’s cinder-block-and-concrete home, wearing a maroon T-shirt proclaiming “Happy Life.”

“Sure, it’s better to be home than in prison, and we appreciate the negotiation process that led Israel to release us early. . . . But we are interested in real peace in which the rights of the Palestinian people will be recognized and their land returned,” he said.

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Nasr, 28, a Gaza-born teacher who was released three months early from a four-year term as a local intifada leader, commented in Jerusalem, “We want to go to the main question, which we see as Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state. The Israelis want to go step by step without saying where those steps will lead, and they want credit for taking each step. . . . Our mentalities are so different that I wonder how we will ever negotiate a settlement.”

Nasr gives the Israelis credit for recognizing that “keeping our people under the gun all the time was going to make talks even harder,” but he urges Rabin to “follow through--pull the troops out of our towns, declare a general amnesty for political prisoners, let people travel freely, permit those who have been deported to return home.

“Such things would establish Israeli sincerity beyond question, but Israelis are still frightened that in the end there would be a Palestinian state next door. That is unavoidable.”