Exiled Years Ago by Israel, 15 Palestinians Return : Mideast: Their triumphant welcome reflects widespread hope than an independent Palestine is coming.

Fifteen Palestinian nationalist leaders exiled by Israel over the past 25 years as opponents of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip returned home Friday to a triumphant welcome that reflected the widespread hope that an independent Palestine is coming.

“We are back, and more deportees are on the way home as well,” Hanna Nasser, 56, the president of Bir Zeit University, told the cheering crowd. “Palestinian independence is also coming, we believe, and the Israeli occupation is drawing to a close. . . . These are the goals we will work for.”

The first Palestinian exiles to return as the result of negotiations with Israel, the group included some of the men and women who began the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1960s and 1970s. A second group of 15 is scheduled to return Monday.

Most declared that they would resume their political activities where they left off before Israeli authorities deported them 15, 20 or 25 years ago and strive to move the West Bank and Gaza Strip rapidly toward independence as a Palestinian state.

“Palestine, we are your men!” Faisal Kanan, 57, a Nablus dentist exiled in 1968 and now a member of Fatah, the major group in the Palestine Liberation Organization, shouted. And a welcoming crowd of 5,000 began dancing and chanting, “Revolution, revolution, revolution until victory!”

As police and soldiers watched from a distance, the crowd held aloft pictures of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and waved the outlawed Palestinian flag. “In its length and breadth, Fatah shakes the ground,” youths chanted as they surged through the Allenby Bridge’s dusty bus terminal. Three Boy Scout troops formed an honor guard with bands of bagpipes, bugles, cymbals and drums.

“This is a big day in our lives and in the life of the Palestinian people,” said Dr. Abdul-Aziz Haj Ahmad, 50, a former member of the Palestine National Council, the Palestinians’ parliament-in-exile. “It is an important step toward peace, toward Palestinian statehood.”

Thousands of Palestinians lined the streets of Jericho to greet the motorcade, a local park was filled to overflowing with a tumultuous welcome rally and their hometowns--Nablus, Ramallah, Al Birah, East Jerusalem and Gaza City--held street parties late into the night in celebration.

“I feel like I was just reborn,” Abdel-Jawad Saleh, 61, a silver-haired former mayor of the West Bank town of Al Birah, said as young men hoisted him on their shoulders. “I have waited 19 years for this day, but I never dreamed of such a welcome. You can see what hopes our people now have!”

Intended by Israel as a goodwill gesture to promote the long-stalled negotiations with the Arabs, the deportees’ return symbolized the reversal of what in the Palestinians’ minds have been years of being driven from their land, uprooted from their homes and forced into exile.

“Deportation to a Palestinian is not just exile in a foreign land, but the whole history of the Palestinian people,” said Nazemi Judeh, a history professor at Bir Zeit University and a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks with Israel. “We hope this move, which is really the first fruits of 18 months of negotiations, will encourage our people and give them hope in the peace process.”

But the return of the deportees from their long years in exile and the other Israeli concessions drew angry protests from Jewish settlers in the West Bank. A group of more than 30 Israelis blockaded the main streets of Al Birah and broke the windows of homes and stores before troops dispersed them and arrested some. In Jericho, demonstrators demanded that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin be “deported.”

There were dissents as well among the Palestinians as critics noted that the 30 leaders returning from exile are just a token when measured against the more than 1,200 Palestinians deported over the years--and against the 396 men, suspected of supporting the fundamentalist Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, still exiled in southern Lebanon after being expelled in December.

“Fatah is exaggerating the importance of all this,” Ghassan Khatib, a leader of the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party and another member of the peace talks delegation, said. “This offends the families of those who did not come back and those in Hamas whose members are still in Lebanon.”

Yet, hope and joy were the overriding Palestinian emotions.

“To see our leaders returning after so many years in exile is to have hope again for our nation’s future,” Rawda Bassir, chairwoman of the Palestinian Women’s Action Committee commented.

“Their return symbolizes an end to our ‘deportation’ as a nation and the start of the realization of our hope to have a land of our own to live in.”