181 Arabs Back From Forced Exile in Lebanon, Face Uncertain Future : Repatriation: Israeli move seeks to build confidence in PLO accord, which many of the activists reject<i> .</i>

With quiet prayers and nonstop tears, nearly half of the more than 400 suspected Palestinian radicals whose deportation from the Israeli occupied territories last December threatened to derail the Mideast peace process returned Thursday from forced exile to a nation now on the threshold of peace.

As they crossed the border one by one between South Lebanon and Israel’s self-declared “security zone,” each of the 181 fundamentalists, who spent the last nine months in tents, paused for a moment, Koran in hand and suitcase by his side, to say a short prayer. Then, each walked on to waiting Israeli buses and a future as uncertain as that of the region.

“Today is judgment day,” declared Ahmed Mubarak, who was a clerk in the courts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Ramallah when Israeli authorities rousted him from his home last winter, handcuffed him and bused him to a barren hillside in South Lebanon.

“You don’t know if you’re going to the fire or to heaven.”

Indeed, many of the deportees will merely be trading their outdoor prison for an indoor one. And eight of those who were to be allowed back chose to remain in Lebanon, apparently fearing long jail terms if they returned.

Small groups of Israeli protesters jeered, spat at and pounded on the sides of the dozen buses as they rolled passed the northern town of Kiryat Shemona.

Israeli military authorities said they had taken all the returnees to detention facilities for two or three days. During that period, the authorities will judge which of the men can go home and which ones will be placed in jail cells as potential subversives who could torpedo the prospects for peace.

Leading activists among the men are likely to be charged with inciting terror and tried in Israeli military courts, Israeli officials said. Overall, Israel will try to ensure that the most fervent of the Muslims are kept out of their communities in the months leading up to self-government in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the sources said.

Israel hopes that the men have “learned a lesson and now know that the government of Israel will not rest in the face of violence and terrorism,” Defense Ministry spokesman Oded Ben-Ami said. “We will not hesitate to take extraordinary measures against those who engage in terrorism.”

Despite the warning, the men’s repatriation was intended by Israel to build confidence in the peace accord it is signing with the PLO.

Israel has promised to permit those remaining to return in three months, before the first anniversary of their expulsion Dec. 17. And so, just as emotional as their uncertain futures on Thursday was the painful separation of men who had endured together winter blizzards, spring thunderstorms, the blistering heat of summer and, through it all, a deeply shared belief in Islam.

“I am losing my sons,” said a tearful professor, Aziz Dweik. His rhetoric against both Israel and the moderate Palestinian factions that are about to sign a peace accord with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has prolonged his stay in the hillside tent city that the refugees nicknamed “The City of the Return.”

But Dweik expressed pride as well as sorrow.

“This Palestinian camp is the first ever to be dismantled--through Palestinian steadfastness,” he said. Clearly, he referred to the dozens of Palestinian camps still scattered through the occupied territories that Israel has ruled since conquering them in the 1967 war and to the deportees’ stubborn refusal to accept earlier Israeli offers of limited clemency.

There was surprisingly little political comment during the early morning crossing by men universally opposed to the pending autonomy plan that will give Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and his followers limited self-rule in the occupied lands.

In interviews during their final days on the hillside, the deportees, most of them members of, or sympathizers with, the fundamentalist Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said that the peace proposal gives the Palestinians too little too late.

They vowed to use their new freedom to wage a nonviolent fight against it when they return to their villages and homes.

On Thursday, amid hugs, kisses, tears and backslapping among those departing and those remaining behind, there was the occasional, “I’ll see you at the Al Aqsa mosque”--the third-holiest shrine in Islam, located in Israeli-held East Jerusalem, which Israel has said is non-negotiable in the peace talks.

The head border guard, a member of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army who shouted each deportee’s name through a loudspeaker at the crossing point, even opened Thursday’s ceremony with a joke: “Is there anyone here from the new government of the State of Gaza?”

But for most of the deportees, many of whom were taken from their jail cells before dawn nine months ago, it was a somber morning that stood in stark contrast with their going-away party the previous night.

“We’re very sad today because we have to leave our friends behind,” said Shaker Hassan, 33, a religious leader from Jericho.

Shahir Subhi Ahmed, a 30-year-old teacher from Ramallah, seemed to sum up the feeling of many when he said: “Today, it is a day of only half-happiness.”

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Nicosia, Cyprus, and special correspondent Raschka from Marj Zahour. Times staff writer Michael Parks, in Jerusalem, contributed to this report.