Observers see hope in accord for West Bank burial

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The agreement yesterday between Palestinians and Israelis that Yasser Arafat will be buried amid his ruined headquarters may represent the first faint ray of hope for a fresh start toward peace in the post-Arafat era, Middle East officials and observers say.

The Palestinians had wanted him buried on Jerusalem's holiest site, the epicenter of the Middle East conflict. The Israelis had wanted him interred in a remote area of the Gaza Strip. But both sides moved quickly and quietly to a compromise rather than confrontation.

The headquarters, known as the Muqata, has acquired both positive and negative significance for Palestinians and Israelis during their latest conflict.

For Palestinians, it represents the steadfastness of their national father figure in the face of the massed might of Israel's armed forces. Surrounded by Israeli tanks and snipers, Arafat lived here for more than 2 years without bending to the will of the foe. The Muqata also symbolizes the high cost to his people from continuous war the past four years.

What once was a splendid complex, the administrative capital of the nascent state of Palestine, has largely been destroyed, as have many of the structures and institutions of self-rule that were erected in the early 1990s, when hopes for the Oslo peace process were high. Bulldozers were pushing around heaps of rubble and grotesquely twisted cars yesterday in an effort to clear a gravesite.

For Israelis, the Muqata represents steadfastness of a different sort: Their leaders, who concluded Arafat was a cause of terrorism and would never rein in extremist groups, were resolute in isolating him there, despite condemnation by most of Europe and all of the Muslim world.

But in the fight around the Muqata, the Israelis were also forced to see the limits of their power. They promised the United States that Arafat would not be harmed and that turned the muqata into a safe haven for their worst enemies -- leading militants whom they could not pursue for fear of injuring Arafat.

Israeli officials consistently said that Arafat was free to leave the compound. But they stressed that this did not mean he would be allowed to return, nor did it mean that if he left they would refrain from going after the militants who took sheltered there.

''It is appropriate that the symbol of the siege against Arafat and the Palestinian people would continue to be a symbol as his tomb," said Gershon Baskin, Israeli codirector of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, an environmental organization that is one of a handful of joint ventures still functioning. ''All these destroyed buildings, all the cars piled up, and there is Arafat's tomb in the middle. Of course, the Israelis will say it symbolizes what he brought on himself. It definitely has a lot of messages."

Many of those messages are about the past, but the most hopeful and significant one may be about the future. Both sides could have been stubborn on the burial issue, as happened on many issues during Arafat's rule. Each would have insisted on a solution absolutely rejected by the other. Each would have made propaganda at the other's expense, and relations would have continued to spiral downward.

Arafat had long dreamed of being buried on the sacred Jerusalem hill known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. But Israel flatly rejected the idea.

Edward S. Walker Jr., who served as US ambassador to Egypt and Israel in the 1990s, said the agreement on the Ramallah burial site illustrated important differences between Arafat and his political heirs, Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and Mahmoud Abbas, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

''It is very typical of Abu Mazen [Abbas] and Abu Ala [Qurei] to be pragmatic and not to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over something that is not winnable," Walker, president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told editors at the Globe yesterday. ''That kind of compromise would not have happened under Arafat. It is a good sign."

A squabble over Arafat's resting place ''is not the kind of first step the new leadership wants to make with Israel," Baskin said. ''They are looking to make a fresh start."

He noted that no Israeli military strikes were launched in reaction to a mortar barrage and two infiltration attempts against Israeli communities yesterday, which he called ''uncharacteristically wise judgment on the part of the Israeli government."

Palestinians began gravitating to the Ramallah compound yesterday as word spread that Arafat would be buried here.

''It is a symbol of our struggle, a symbol of our resistance," said Mohammed al-Batwari, 77, a leading Palestinian intellectual who was held in the Muqata's cells at various times by the British, the Jordanians, and the Israelis. His sons, who played soccer in the courtyards with Israeli soldiers when they were children, later were jailed by Arafat's regime.

But Ikrema Sabri, mufti of Jerusalem, issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, requiring that Arafat be buried in Jerusalem. The decision to bury him in Ramallah was simply a ''political and administrative procedure," said Sabri, an Arafat appointee.

Globe correspondents Sa'id Ghazali in Ramallah and Alon Tuval in Jerusalem contributed to this report.