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November 19, 2004/Kislev 6 5765, Vol. 57, No. 12
Arafat buried in Ramallah
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
RAMALLAH - Tarek Abdel Geneh held onto the hands of his fellow Arab Israeli friends and together they pushed their way through the sea of mourners clamoring to reach the burial of Yasser Arafat.
A black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh draped on his shoul-ders, the tall public-policy student said he felt it was important to make the journey from his home in Haifa to Ramallah for the historic day.
"It's a day of mourning for the Palestinian nation as well as the Arab and Muslim world," said Abdel Geneh, 24. "He's a symbol for Palestin-ians. Since the 1960s we have known no other leader."
Arafat, who died Nov. 11 at a military hospital outside Paris at age 75, was buried Nov. 12 in a chaotic scene in the ruins of his Ramallah compound following a state funeral in Cairo.
Egyptian helicopters flew Arafat's body and accom-panying Palestinian Authority leaders from Cairo to a parking lot near the burial site in Ramallah, Ha'aretz reported.
From there, a jeep carrying the casket crawled through the crowd, with P.A. security men sprawling over the coffin to protect it, at times hurling mourners off the casket when they clambered atop. At one point, the Palestinian flag adorning the coffin was ripped off the casket and was replaced with the type of Arab head covering that Arafat habitually wore.
As the coffin reached the burial site, Islamic clerics recited verses from the Koran, and the casket was lowered into the grave. The coffin reportedly was built with hooks on the bottom so that at some point it may be possible to unearth it and bring it to Jerusalem. Arafat wanted to be buried on the Temple Mount, but Israel refused to allow it.
Israel declined to send a representative to the funeral.
Though some Israeli officials had come to regard Arafat in the 1990s as a potential partner for peace, his continued use of terrorism as a diplomatic tool led Israeli officials to repudiate him definitively after the failure of the Camp David summit in July 2000 and the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada two months later.
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