JERUSALEM — 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."
