Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Cast Adrift After Siege, Bethlehem Exiles Grieve
The Palestinian fighters arrived here from Bethlehem to cheering crowds, hot meals and bursts of celebratory gunfire.

"When the people of Gaza came to meet us, it was your mother taking you into her arms," said Maji Dana, 25, one of the 26 gunmen who had spent more than a month holed up in the Church of the Nativity.

Little more than a week later, however, the fighters exiled to Gaza and 13 more who were sent abroad in the deal that ended the long standoff at the church are becoming uncomfortable symbols for many Palestinians of their government's capitulation to Israeli and foreign pressure.

The echoes, critics of the deal said, could scarcely be crueler: after half a century in which Palestinians have fought for the return of compatriots who fled at Israel's creation, they have been forced from their homes once more.

Adding to the sting, European officials announced today that the Bethlehem fighters who had been flown to Cyprus at Israel's insistence would be scattered among at least half a dozen European countries.

"To have died in Bethlehem would have been better than this," said Mustafa Abdel Aziz, 52, a construction engineer who was working today in a Gaza refugee camp. "They should have refused to go."

The fighters now in Gaza and some of the Palestinian officials who negotiated on their behalf say they had only bad choices to make: to be marched off to an Israeli prison, to die fighting or to swallow a bitter exile. The longer they held out, the gunmen said, the longer the besieged residents of Bethlehem would have had to hold out with them.

"I don't think people have been able to get over it," said Hisham Ahmed, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. "It was painful enough when the deportations were being done by the Israelis. But it is more painful still when it is on the watch of the Palestinian authorities."

The hardened gunmen who arrived exuberant and exhausted in Gaza City on May 10 appear to be growing more unsettled as the days pass.

"I feel like a tourist," said Maji Dana, a 25-year-old member of Hamas.

Mr. Dana said he had not been allowed to travel outside Bethlehem since he had been put on an Israeli blacklist after being arrested for the first time at age 16. But now, he said, he was stuck again.

He cannot work for one of the Hamas social agencies in Gaza without compromising its civil status, he said. Nor is he likely to find work on his own. He will probably accept an offer to work in some capacity for the Palestinian Authority — the same authority that threw him in jail last year for his militant activities.

Although Hamas is largely headquartered in Gaza, leaders of the organization hardly seemed more sympathetic to Mr. Dana and the other Bethlehem gunmen than the Israeli authorities, who accused most of them of having joined in attacks on Jewish settlers.

Fighters from Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group loyal to Mr. Arafat's Fatah organization, seemed to be on similarly unsteady ground.

"This is very difficult, that's true," said Gamal Abayat, 38. "But we never planned to enter the church. That is where the battle took place, and we were grateful when the doors opened to us."

After fighting the Israelis for most of his life, one former Palestinian intelligence official, Khalid Hamdallah, 31, said he was now in the strange position of pinning some of his hopes on negotiations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/international/middleeast/21GAZA.html

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