JUBILANT JERICHO
YOUTHS GIVE AGING PALESTINIANS A HEROES' WELCOME
- JON IMMANUEL. Jerusalem
Post. Jerusalem: May 4, 1993
HUNDREDS of Jericho
youths hoisted a dozen aging men off a bus from the Allenby Bridge yesterday,
and carried them shoulder-high through a refugee camp thirsting for heroes.
The arrival of the second
group of Palestinian deportees from Jordan was no less dramatic to the local
population for being preceded by a group of 15 deportees three days earlier.
However, the 14 mostly elderly men who arrived yesterday seemed to take less
naturally than the other group to the adulation heaped upon them.
At least one returnee,
79-year-old former Jordanian mayor of Jerusalem Ruhi Khatib, was driven
straight home, bypassing the welcome at Akabat Jaber camp on the outskirts of
Jericho. Thousands fled from this camp and crossed to Jordan in 1967. Another,
Mahmoud Kadri, a Ramallah writer, did not arrive with the others and was
expected later this week. A third, Walid Kimhawi, a former member of the PLO
executive committee kept falling off the shoulders of the cheering youths who
carried him and had to walk. A fourth, Daoud Erekat who is almost blind,
appeared fearful of heights. A fifth, Hebron Communist Dr. Naim Shahab tightly
clutched a carrier bag he was holding as he was jostled on the sea of shoulders
towards the waiting crowd. On the way he passed a car on which a poster with
his picture had been pasted. It said "Welcome home to Dr. Naim Shahab, the
great national leader," who had spent most of his exile in communist
Czechoslovakia.
One old man who had come
down from Nablus, said as he witnessed the parade of other old men that it was
like "seeing the dead come to life." Then he apologized and bolted
towards an old friend, Dr. Adnan Bakri, waving his arms to the crowd and
chanting nationalist slogans from his shabiba's throne. Bakri got down and the
two men flung their arms around each other in greeting.
"It is important
that people who were leaders in their communities on the national level and who
have been away so long, should be welcomed like this," said Zahira Kamal,
an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team, who welcomed the 14 returnees
at the bridge. But she was wary of attaching too much importance to the return,
fearful of setting high expectations. She is a member of the recently formed
Palestinian Democratic Federation, the first political party established in the
territories, which promoted the ceremony and provided many of the banners.
But the repetition of
Friday's welcome, combined with optimistic assessments from the Palestinian
delegation in Washington, has strengthened the feeling among many observers
that something is changing in relations between Israelis and Palestinians.
While Palestinians
hoisted pictures of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian flag, soldiers
looked on with mild curiosity from the road where they were policing traffic
and from the roof of a military base next door.
At one point during a three-hour wait five members of the extreme anti-Arab Kach group demonstrated across the road from the camp and taunted thousands of youths who began advancing towards them on the other side of the camp's perimeter fence, shouting "Go to hell," in Hebrew. Almost simultaneously Israeli troops on one side of the fence rushed in to block the Kach demonstrators from view and the shabiba on the other side, some with iron bars, formed a cordon to stop the advance of the angry crowd towards the fence.
© 1993 The Jerusalem
Post