<i> Intifada </i> Architects Prepare to Head Home : Israel: Palestinian uprising’s leaders are returning to pave way for self-rule in occupied areas. Some were exiled six years.
CAIRO — They were the architects of the intifada, the six-year Palestinian uprising in which these men, many middle-aged and with hints of a paunch, left their jobs at City Hall and their university classes and pharmacies and began handing out leaflets, organizing meetings, resisting the Israeli occupation.
Israel said they were dangerous, put them in prison and ultimately deported them from their homes. For years they lived in exile. Some went back to school at universities in Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East. Some joined the staffs of Palestine Liberation Organization embassies in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Libya, or the PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, assisting the intifada from abroad.
Today, they are going home. Israel has allowed a number of deportees to return to the occupied territories in recent months, including activists from the Islamic fundamentalist organization Hamas who sat stranded on a Lebanon mountainside for more than a year. A few exiled academics have trickled back into the West Bank.
But Israel has never readmitted the deportees of the uprising, considered too volatile to come home--until today, when, as part of the Palestinian-Israeli peace plan under negotiation in Cairo, 46 Palestinians deported during the intifada will begin returning to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A little more than a dozen are scheduled to cross the Egyptian border at Rafah into the Gaza Strip at noon today. More are traversing into the West Bank from Jordan--the first new citizens of the Palestinian self-rule zones being fashioned in Gaza and Jericho.
“It pleases me to know that I represent a danger to the occupation forces. We are. But they (the Israelis) are the ones forming a danger toward our children, our lives, our families, our land. Truly, who is the one who represents danger? Us or them?†asked Freij Ahmad Khairy, 46, who is one of 14 scheduled to leave in the first wave from Egypt on a bus this morning.
Khairy, an engineer and activist from PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, has not been home to the Gaza Strip in nearly six years, since his deportation order in April, 1988.
Among those leaving with him were to be Ahmed Deek, a former student at Nablus University, and Abdullah abu Samahdaneh, a former mathematics professor at the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip.
At his apartment in the Cairo suburb of Nasser City on Monday night, Khairy sat with mementos of his exile years: a filigree Tunisian bird cage acquired from his time at PLO headquarters in Tunis; a poster of Jerusalem’s holy Dome of the Rock, inscribed with a single message: “The Return.â€
Khairy, who has quietly helped direct the intifada from Cairo since his deportation in 1988, left Israel after a swarm of Israeli officers descended on his home in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip and accused him of recruiting for the Fatah organization, along with other unspecified charges. He became one of the first eight men deported during the uprising.
At a time of peacemaking, he is going home to a land whose future is more uncertain than ever. Far from welcoming the “Gaza-Jericho first†peace plan negotiated by the exiled PLO leadership, many Gazans have bitterly condemned it as too little, too late.
“It is true that some problems have occurred after the agreement of Gaza and Jericho, but do not expect not to have problems. Problems will be there. And it is true that this step is a very small step. But it is a beginning of a direction toward peace,†Khairy said.
In the wake of the massacre of about 30 Palestinians in Hebron more than a month ago--a slaughter that turned the peace process on its ear--the return of the deportees represents one of a series of quiet confidence-building steps the Israelis are prepared to offer to get the peace talks back on track.
Palestinian officials say they have been assured that all Palestinian prisoners will be freed by the end of July. In return, Israelis hope Arafat will be able to deliver peace.
With six years in exile, Khairy said, “the foundation and basis of my life have been completely destroyed. My wife and children have been with me, but my parents were left behind. We have paid a heavy price. But I pray to God because if we fought, we fought so we could help our children avoid seeing what we saw. We fought so we could give them a life like normal children anywhere else.â€
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