Palestinians Plan a Hero’s Welcome for Arafat on His Return to Gaza : Mideast: PLO leader agrees to arrive today, instead of on Jewish Sabbath. Thousands of settlers gather in Jerusalem to protest his trip.

After 27 years in exile fighting for Palestinian independence, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat returns today to the Gaza Strip, his ancestral homeland, as the head of the new Palestinian government there.

Palestinians plan a hero’s welcome for the guerrilla leader, greeting him as the liberator who ended the long Israeli occupation of Gaza and put their nation on what they hope is the road to statehood.

“We expect thousands of Palestinian citizens to come from everywhere to welcome him in Gaza,” Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian planning minister and a close Arafat adviser, said in Cairo. “There is a happy mood. People have all really welcomed this agreement (on Palestinian autonomy), they welcomed the freedom it has brought, the safety, the freedom from fear. This is the start of Palestine.”

Arafat, in an unexpected and conciliatory gesture to religious Israelis, agreed Thursday to move up his arrival by a day so he would not arrive on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

In Jerusalem, thousands of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank began to gather to protest his arrival in Gaza and prevent any attempt by him to pray at Islamic shrines here.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin accused the settlers and right-wing parties of planning not only to paralyze Jerusalem with protests but to seize government buildings and incite violence between Jews and Arabs. He said there are no plans for Arafat to visit Jerusalem.

As demonstrators blocked two of the city’s main entrances Thursday evening, Rabin warned that the government would “use full force to preserve law and order and to prevent clashes pitting Jew against Jew and Jew against Arab.” Police arrested several settler leaders during scuffles.

A mass demonstration is planned for Saturday night. But protests will begin today with an attempt by Jewish settlers to form a human chain around Jerusalem’s Old City as Muslims gather for midday Friday prayers at Al Aqsa mosque.

“We have to inflame Jerusalem, and then we have to inflame the whole country,” Deputy Mayor Shmuel Meir, one of the organizers of the anti-Arafat protests, said, “so Rabin won’t even think about bringing that man into Jerusalem.”

Rehavam Zeevi, leader of the ultranationalist Moledet (Homeland) Party, citing past killings of Israelis by Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas, said, “It’s as though Hitler--a little Hitler--came to step on the Jews’ land in order to look at the relatives of those he murdered and to choose his next victims.”

Police expect 250,000 demonstrators here this weekend, and they have deployed 10,000 officers, half of the country’s force, to maintain order as the protests spread. Code-named “Blazing Desert,” the operation is the biggest security effort in Israel since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem in 1977. There will be more than 4,000 police in Jerusalem alone.

Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party, said the demonstrations would remain “within the framework of vigorous protest--without violence but with all the legitimate means available in a democracy.”

Although the government and the PLO both denied any plans for Arafat to travel to Jerusalem, Netanyahu declared, “It is obvious that Arafat’s arrival in Gaza is the first stage prior to his arrival in Jerusalem, and that is what we are trying to stop, what we are struggling against with all our might.”

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, responding to right-wing criticism, said, “I don’t know what all this near-hysteria is. (Arafat) was meant to come; he is the head of the Palestinian Authority; he is supposed to be there.”

On Thursday, Rabbi Eliahu Bashki-Doron, Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, asked Arafat to come earlier or later so the thousands of Israeli soldiers and police deployed to ensure his security would not have to violate religious prohibition against working on the Sabbath.

“The first step toward peace is mutual respect . . . of religious feelings,” Bashki-Doron said. “This was a sign of understanding of the feelings of the Jewish people and of respect for our keeping of the Sabbath.”

Shaath, chief PLO negotiator in the talks that led to Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho District in the West Bank, said Arafat would cross into the Gaza Strip from Egypt about 2:30 p.m. today (4:30 a.m. PDT) after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.

Maj. Gen. Abdel-Razzak Majaideh of the Palestinian police said in Gaza City that Arafat would be welcomed at a military ceremony at the Rafah border crossing, then travel to Gaza City in a victory procession expected to bring most of the region’s 850,000 people into the streets.

In Gaza City, Arafat is expected to speak at a rally outside the government headquarters, which housed Israeli forces only two months ago.

Arafat is expected to stay three or four days in Gaza, a 140-square-mile strip of Mediterranean coastline stretching from Egypt’s Sinai desert to Israel. He might also travel to Jericho on Sunday, but firm plans have not yet been made. He has not said when he will move permanently to the Palestinian territories.

Arafat, whose father’s family was prominent in Gaza, left the West Bank after its capture by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War; then a little-known guerrilla leader, he tried to organize an uprising against the occupation but failed.

As a precaution against assassination attempts, Palestinian officials said most details of Arafat’s trip will remain secret.

On Thursday, gunmen wounded two Israeli soldiers in a drive-by shooting near a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Callers to Western news agencies said it was a “salute” to Arafat from the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Hamas, the PLO’s main rival in the Palestinian territories, opposes the PLO’s peace agreement with Israel and is continuing its armed struggle against any Israeli presence in Gaza or the West Bank.