Arafat Returns Home to a Hero’s Welcome

GAZA CITY — Thousands of supporters gave Yasser Arafat a choreographed hero’s homecoming Wednesday, celebrating his refusal to yield on the Palestinians’ demand for a sovereign capital in East Jerusalem for their future state. But the Palestinian Authority president said he was ready for more U.S.-brokered peace talks as early as next month.

“Jerusalem does not belong only to the Palestinian nation, but to the entire Arab nation, all the Muslims and Christians of the world,” Arafat said after arriving from 14 days of failed talks at Camp David, Md. “Whoever accepts this, fine. Whoever does not, let him drink from the sea at Gaza.”

The rally, which featured marching bands, was one of the biggest for Arafat since his 1994 return from a life of exile to territory Israel ceded to Palestinian self-rule. The festivities orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority upstaged Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s low-key return from the summit to a nation in political upheaval over the concessions that he offered.

In the coming days, both leaders will assess whether the effort to end 52 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be revived and new bloodshed averted. Having lost his majority in Israel’s parliament, Barak must find a way to govern.

But for Arafat, whose regime permits only tame opposition parties and press, Wednesday was a day to bask in his summit-spoiler role, even as he praised President Clinton’s “maximum efforts” at mediation and offered to sit and talk again.

A young girl put flowers around the 70-year-old Palestinian leader’s neck as he arrived in the Gaza Strip. Supporters lined his sun-scorched route from the airport to his seaside compound, waving Palestinian flags, Arafat posters and banners hailing Abu Ammar, the leader’s nom de guerre, as “forever the leader and symbol of the Palestinian people.”

Another widely distributed banner--which depicted the Al Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam--read: “We are following Arafat on the way to Jerusalem.”

Throngs Pay Tribute in Gaza City

Crowds parted like the Red Sea and women ululated as Arafat, wearing his trademark checkered headdress, rolled into the fenced compound in an open vehicle to be hoisted by aides over a crush of admirers and deposited upright on a table in front of his headquarters.

“This is a day of welcome to you for your heroic position in refusing to compromise on our sovereign lands, on Jerusalem and the rights of our refugees to return home,” an announcer bellowed over loudspeakers.

“We are ready to give our soul and our blood to our great hero!” the crowd chanted in reply.

At that point, many expected Arafat to speak--perhaps explain his rejection of Barak’s offer to give Palestinians administrative control, but not sovereignty, in some East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and perhaps offer a vision of where the peace process is heading.

Israel captured East Jerusalem, sacred ground for Jews and Christians as well as Muslims, in the 1967 Middle East War and proclaimed the city its indivisible capital. Palestinians insist on sovereignty over East Jerusalem as their future capital, and Arafat has vowed to unilaterally declare an independent state even if new talks fail to define its borders in the West Bank and Gaza.

Instead of a post-summit assessment from Arafat, the crowd got an odd spectacle.

For a moment, the Palestinian leader merely waved and flashed a victory sign. Then suddenly he was hoisted again, stiff like a mannequin, and passed backward by a human conveyor belt of aides and security guards into the headquarters building behind a solid metal door that rolled shut before the surging crowd.

“Our president is tired,” explained Nabil Shaath, Arafat’s minister of international cooperation, who took part in the peace talks.

But no speech was needed. The same government apparatus that organized the rally had already put out the official Palestinian line, which civil servants, off-duty policemen and other members of Arafat’s Fatah movement repeated with scant variation in remarks to reporters.

“The Americans and Israelis fail to understand one thing: Arafat cannot make compromises on Jerusalem,” said Fatma Rabah, a former Palestinian police colonel who was in the crowd. “The Palestinian people totally trust their leadership. They are frustrated that our president did not come home with an agreement, but it’s not the end of our dream.”

A Leader ‘Who Knows What His People Want’

Members of Arafat’s summit delegation, in interviews here, depicted the Palestinian leader as a statesman who had made huge concessions to Israel over the years and could compromise no more.

“Arafat has survived because he knows what his people want, and he has led them,” said Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, an unofficial spokeswoman for the delegation. “He cannot sacrifice his own legitimacy, his ability to negotiate agreements.”

Accepting Barak’s offer, she said, would have given birth to “a truncated [Palestinian] state, fragmented internally and surrounded externally, and that would have produced more conflict, more instability, more unrest.”

Palestinian officials acknowledged that they had failed to make a convincing case to the Americans and expressed annoyance that Clinton had blamed Arafat for the collapse of the talks. But they welcomed the American leader’s offer to keep trying to bridge the gap.

“As President Clinton said yesterday, it is possible to go back one more time next month to Washington or to any other place he chooses” for more negotiations, Arafat told reporters in Alexandria, Egypt, after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his way home.

Arafat plans to visit more Arab capitals next week to explain the failure of the summit and seek support for continued talks with Israel.

“This is the first offer any Israeli has ever made on Jerusalem,” Shaath said, rejecting the idea that Arafat had seen Israel’s best offer. “We’re determined to keep engaged. This is not the last step. This is the first serious one.”

In the meantime, Palestinian and Israeli officials say they are worried about renewed violence.

Wednesday’s rally assembled row after row of Palestinian children wearing black T-shirts issued at summer camps where they have been training for combat. Some adults in the crowd, including Suleyman Amasi, 43, a university professor and father of six, said they were willing to sacrifice their children to gain control of Jerusalem.

Israeli Army Says It Won’t Raise Tensions

In Ramallah, on the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the Fatah movement, stirred up another rally Wednesday by warning that if Jewish settlers “dare enter our land, it will become their graveyards.”

The Israeli army took pains to insist that it will not escalate tensions with the Palestinians and had ordered no reinforcements or troop movements during these precarious days. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the army chief of staff, said his senior officers would meet with Palestinian security commanders in an effort to keep the calm.

Asked whether Fatah could control its militants in Gaza, Shaath said he and other Palestinian leaders were not concerned.

“Why would they seek trouble?” he asked. “They have no fear that their leader is going to give up their objectives. And they all have the hope that he’ll keep trying to achieve the peace.”