Arafat Exhorts Opponents to Join in Lifting ‘Burden’

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rode Saturday into this sweltering refugee camp that was the birthplace of the Palestinian uprising, calling on his opponents to “come and lift the burden with me” in the struggle for peace.

Venturing into the most dangerous territory yet in his rendezvous with an anxious and impoverished homeland, Arafat defended the peace pact with Israel that has spawned a furious opposition campaign by the dozen or more political fronts that operate out of Jabaliya.

“Let us talk honestly now,” Arafat told the thousands gathered in a Jabaliya schoolyard. “Maybe the agreement we made doesn’t really suit us. But you have to understand it was the best possible agreement we could make under the circumstances of a desperate Arab situation.

“I call on Hamas, on Islamic Jihad, on the Popular Front . . .” Arafat said, naming each of his opponents, “and I ask them to come and lift the burden with me. The burden is very heavy. Come and share it with me. The process is very long and hard.”

The appeal almost had a ring of fatigue in an otherwise boisterous address, delivered under heavy security, with police sharpshooters standing along rooftops and eyeing the enthusiastic crowd below.

The Palestine Liberation Organization leader crossed into Gaza from Egypt on Friday, ending a 27-year exile. Officials said that before his visit ends Tuesday, he will visit Jericho, the West Bank enclave that, along with Gaza, is under Palestinian self-rule. Arafat will swear in a 24-member governing authority during the Jericho trip, aides said.

Arafat has previously expressed concern about coming to the turbulent Gaza Strip before his security forces asserted complete control, but he decided to take the gamble Saturday when he ventured into Jabaliya, a camp of about 110,000 Palestinians displaced from Israel since 1948 and the site of some of the intifada ‘s most furious street conflicts.

With its thick sand streets, tightly lined with ramshackle homes of concrete block, asbestos and corrugated aluminum, Jabaliya is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. It is the poorest of Gaza’s refugee camps, and its residents, who in 1987 began the daily shower of stones on Israeli soldiers that ultimately ate away at their will to remain, have lived as refugees for 46 years.

They have only the distant hope of a new economic prosperity under Palestinian self-rule in Gaza to salve the realization that Arafat’s peace plan means they will likely never leave Jabaliya’s pungent streets.

“They’ve stolen everything,” Riyadh Awkal said of the Israelis as he waited for Arafat’s motorcade to pass by. “We grew up under the occupation. They robbed me of everything essential, the way occupation usually does. It has stolen my freedom, my sense of security, the capacity to lead a normal life.”

Awkal, a 38-year-old day laborer who grew up in Jabaliya, spoke quietly and without inflection as he surveyed the squalid neighborhood around him.

“There isn’t a single aim I’ve wanted in my life that I have managed to achieve, be it education or building a family or, on a more general level, building a proper nation,” he said. “It’s important for Arafat to come here, to see the situation of this camp . . . to see the reality of the people and see how they really live in suffering.”

A few hours before the PLO chairman’s visit, the doctors in one of Jabaliya’s two functioning clinics erupted into an argument in the clinic courtyard.

“This agreement he made is nothing! . . . We achieve nothing with this solution!” one doctor grumbled as a colleague of his grinned, put his arm around him and pulled him back inside the clinic.

“The most important thing is that he’s coming. He’s coming to live in his country. He’s coming with his respect intact, and he’s going to be like a sultan,” said the colleague, a Fatah physician.

The other doctor still shook his head in disgust. “He arrived yesterday, and he went straight to the legislative building (in downtown Gaza). That wasn’t where he was supposed to go. He was supposed to come to Jabaliya.

“We were the ones who left our imprint on the intifada. We sacrificed the largest number of people, we have the largest number of deportees, the largest number of prisoners. He should have come here first.”

Indeed, security risks or no, there was no way Arafat could have avoided Jabaliya and its landscape of misery. But some dramatic changes greeted the chairman’s motorcade:

* The huge watchtower that was the Israeli army’s dominating eye over Jabaliya throughout the occupation now has a Palestinian flag atop it, raised after the Israeli withdrawal a few weeks ago.

* The barrel-and-concrete barriers that formerly sealed off the camp’s main square as a measure of protection for Israeli soldiers now lie in ruins--Jabaliya’s version of the Berlin Wall torn down in an enthusiastic frenzy.

* The fact that the clinic courtyard was empty except for a group of quarreling physicians was important in itself: Two years ago, during a particularly violent intifada weekend, 400 wounded were stretched out on the concrete floor.

To one and all in the past two days, Arafat’s message has been one of self-reliance, urging Palestinians not to wait until the international community comes to their aid.

At dinner Friday night in a comfortable seaside hotel, Arafat insisted on locally produced watermelon and cheese for dessert.

Arafat is frustrated by the slow trickle of international donations to finance Palestinian self-rule. In Jabaliya on Saturday, he lashed out at the World Bank’s attempts to place restrictions on financial aid and sought support for his insistence on Palestinian jurisdiction over the funding.

“I didn’t accept that they will control the Palestinian economy, because we didn’t finish the military occupation to go to financial occupation,” he said to the cheering crowd.

“The Koran says there have been strong people in this land since the time of Moses,” Arafat said. “In our hunger, from our sweat and our deep belief, the Koran says that ‘you are the highest believers, and if you are believers, you will prevail.’ ”