As Exiles Return, Change Embroils Occupied Lands

Heavily armed Israeli border guards smiled, chatted and occasionally barked orders Tuesday as hundreds of Palestinian activists and family members braved the blazing sun on this remote border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to welcome home two dozen men whom Israel once banished as “terrorist leaders.”

These individuals soon will lead an autonomous Palestine.

Through chants of “Palestine lives!” and “Death to Israel!” an Israeli colonel in charge of the border guard stood for almost an hour among dozens of angry Palestinians, talking for the first time with once-sworn enemies, answering the toughest questions.

“Yes,” the colonel said when asked about the hundreds of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied lands, “I do feel sorry about the children, the ones who have been killed.”

Just 15 miles to the north, one of the most striking images of the extraordinary transition beginning to take shape this week in lands Israel has occupied for 27 years unfolded at the Israeli Defense Forces’ central command headquarters in the heart of Gaza City.

At the compound Israel is about to turn over to the new Palestinian leadership, busloads of soldiers started evacuating the headquarters buildings, packing trucks with equipment.

Brig. Gen. Doron Almog, commander of all Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, gave a guided tour of the facility to a man who spent 18 years in his prisons--Sufiah abu Zaidah, the spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Fatah faction in Gaza, who will be among the headquarters’ future occupants. On Israeli television Tuesday, Almog was shown laughing, sharing cigarettes and clasping hands with leaders of a movement he once hunted.

These were the images Tuesday as Israel and the PLO sought to send powerful, concrete signals to Palestinians in the occupied territories that real change is at hand. They were some of the new realities taking shape in the impoverished Gaza Strip and in the West Bank border town of Jericho.

Leaders on both sides hope the changes will hold armed Jewish and Palestinian extremists at bay as negotiators in Cairo continue to hammer out details of a long-delayed final agreement on implementing full Palestinian autonomy and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho.

In Jericho, future capital of a self-ruled Palestine, 26 more deportees--among them key aides to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat--crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan with 15 women and 31 children in tow.

All told, 50 deportees, most of them architects of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising, returned to a land that had forced them into exile years ago. They now will help form the nucleus of Arafat’s autonomous Palestinian government.

“It is a great moment for us,” Faisal Husseini, Arafat’s Jerusalem-based chief for the West Bank, declared as he accompanied the last deportee across the bridge from Jordan before sunset. “But it is only a small step.”

At the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, about 100 miles away across a vast territory that will remain Israeli, Fatah spokesman Zaidah put it more strongly. “It’s great to have them back,” he said as 24 Fatah leaders were being processed and issued new identity cards by Israeli security forces. “The problem is we are bringing back (50) and leaving behind more than 1 million.”

The leaders’ comments reflected the strong emotions that greeted long-lost brothers, husbands and sons at the border of the future Palestinian enclaves on Tuesday.

“We do have mixed feelings. It is happiness mixed with sorrow,” said Salah abu Jidiyan, 39, who waited for more than five hours in the broiling desert to greet his younger brother, Jamal, at the Rafah crossing.

True enough, Jidiyan said, he was regaining a brother four years after 36-year-old Jamal was taken from his home at midnight in a scene that his wife, Muna, recalled “was the hardest for a human to see.”

But, Jidiyan added, he is still in mourning for his brother-in-law, Nahed Odeh, who was one of the six Fatah activists gunned down in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp last week by an Israeli undercover unit. The attack, in which none of the six activists fired a single shot, plunged the Israeli-PLO peace talks into crisis and forced Israeli officials to apologize for what they called a case of mistaken identity.

What is more, added Jidiyan, who spent 15 of his 39 years in Israeli prisons and narrowly escaped deportation himself, the “Gaza-Jericho first” accord is, in itself, “an insufficient step.” On balance, he concluded, “I am not happy. . . . This (day) is good for me as a person, but generally, what will the situation of Gaza as a whole be?”

Despite the positive signs of change, there were continuing bitter symbols of occupation--isolated clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho.

Soldiers shot three Palestinians in Jericho; three more Palestinians were wounded in rioting in Gaza’s Jabaliya camp, among them an 8-year-old girl. And in Hebron, where clashes have become common in the weeks since a Jewish settler massacred about 30 Palestinians at prayer in the Ibrahim Mosque, Israeli troops sealed off the Islamic University for more than three hours in a siege that stranded more than 500 students.

There were few encouraging signs of an imminent breakthrough in the Cairo talks as well, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that a final agreement will take time. “If someone expects some hocus-pocus and in two or six days everything can be completed, he is simply mistaken and doesn’t know the reality,” Rabin told reporters.

In Cairo, plans to follow Tuesday’s deportee return with a vanguard of Palestinian police--who would prepare for an initial deployment of several hundred Palestinian officers--bogged down in disputes over how many would be permitted in the early stages and how they would be armed.

The PLO insists that the police enter the occupied territories with guns on display, while Israel prefers the officers to enter quietly in buses, with their weapons shipped separately.

Negotiators said they hoped an agreement can be worked out in time to dispatch an early contingent by Thursday. Nabil Shaath, chief PLO negotiator, said the two sides have agreed on an eventual force of about 9,000 Palestinian police in Gaza and Jericho.

Arafat was scheduled to arrive in Cairo this morning to help oversee the talks.

In the absence of such an accord, local PLO officials and the Israeli government sought to project the idea that change was not confined to future autonomous Palestinian enclaves. They also targeted Hebron on Tuesday.

Mustapha Abdul Nabi Natshe, Hebron’s newly appointed pro-PLO mayor, helped defuse a potential firefight, quelling a confrontation when fundamentalist groups opposing the peace process faced off with Israeli troops in a protest march that he had led near the site of the Feb. 25 massacre in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

Meantime, representatives from Norway, Denmark and Italy--which together will contribute 160 armed observers and advisers to an international force authorized to improve Hebron’s security--met with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. Today, they plan to visit the embattled West Bank town, where 415 armed, extremist Jewish settlers live in small settlements surrounded by more than 100,000 Palestinians.

But the strongest, clearest images of change Tuesday appeared in Gaza, long considered a stronghold of the Palestinian fundamentalist Islamic groups who have thrived on the area’s despair and poverty.

Israeli commanders in Gaza have issued explicit orders in recent days to their remaining force that, “during the withdrawal, soldiers should not hurt the feelings or the honor of the Palestinians in any way. From now on, they are to be treated as equals,” Israel Television reported Tuesday night.

As the Israelis stepped up their withdrawal Tuesday, in advance of a final Israeli-PLO autonomy agreement, soldiers smiled, joked and grinned uncontrollably.

The Israeli army truck drivers who hauled the equipment to a new base inside Gush Qatif, one of the Jewish settlements that will remain in Gaza even after the troops withdraw, summed up the feeling of most Israelis as they prepared to leave behind a land that has became a living nightmare.

“The feeling is great,” one army driver said as he waved to an Israel Television cameraman while en route from downtown Gaza City. “We’re going home. Who needs this nuisance?”

Times staff writer Kim Murphy contributed to this report from Cairo.