Little changed under Arafat's rule

Leader: Although he is revered as a symbol of resistance, many Palestinians feel he didn't do enough to improve their everyday lives.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank - The rich and the poor of Bethlehem found something to agree on yesterday:

The funeral and burial of Yasser Arafat on Friday marked the end of a man who had embodied their cause but did little to improve their lives.

Arafat's grave in Ramallah, 20 miles from here, already seemed a world away, and his death a distant memory. Arafat seemed a distraction yesterday. The jobless remained jobless, the bitter remained bitter, the issues dividing Palestinians and Israelis no closer to being resolved.

Amina Ibrahim lives on a narrow street in the city's Aida refugee camp, in the shadow of the wall being built by Israel. Arafat, Ibrahim says, did nothing about the wall, and the wall is unchanged by Arafat's death. Israeli jeeps speed by her house; children throw volleys of stones, bringing clouds of tear gas.

Day after day, she says, she watched laborers guarded by soldiers erect 18-foot-high slabs of concrete while Arafat's Palestinian Authority did nothing to help stop it.

"They finally sent someone to protest, but it was too late," she says. "The Palestinian Authority is hopeless. What can I do now? It's already done. Israel comes and goes as it pleases, and my own government doesn't care."

Even so, she had cried upon hearing of Arafat's death: "He was very dear to my heart, like a father or a brother. May God protect us from what happens next."

Practical steps to bring peace seem out of reach to most here, the idea of compromise long since lost amid the casualties, the clashes, the bullets and the shrinking land. Many here say they are still fighting for what Arafat promised them: return to their homes in Israel, Jerusalem as their capital and a state called Palestine.

"These are symbols of the Palestinian cause, and we need a symbol to ensure that no one ever forfeits them," said Ibrahim's brother, Iad, a 33-year-old electrician.

Yesterday marked the start of Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and Ibrahim's neighbors greeted one another dressed in new clothes. Children ran around with toy guns, aiming them at the new wall that casts a long shadow.

"I expect that the new leaders will not deviate from the mainstream," says Mahmoud Barmel, an electrician, "and that is Arafat."

For Naim Shair, proprietor of the the Arab Orthodox Restaurant, that is exactly why it was time for Arafat to disappear.

"We had a need for our symbolic revolutionary," he said. "Now that time is over."

His restaurant is perched atop one of the summits of Beit Jalla, a well-off, mostly Christian village that climbs a steep hill above Bethlehem and where residents take pride in orderly lots and well-swept streets.

Shari and others say Arafat's era should have ended in 1994 with the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the proto-government intended to evolve into part of an independent Palestinian state.

"Arafat got us to that point, and he should have stepped aside and gone out a hero," says Shair, smoking a cigarette and growing angrier by the sentence. "When it came time for Arafat to actually run the show, he failed. What did he achieve? Anything? All of our institutions need to be reconstructed, and this is not going to be as easy as people think. Even if Arafat had stayed alive, it would have been time for a change."

Muhannad Abdullah, from the nearby village of el-Khader, was no less harsh: "Arafat was admired by everyone, but he could not run the day-to-day life of the Palestinians."

"People got tired of Arafat, but he held all of us in one hand," Abdullah said. "I know that Israel is my enemy and we can kill each other for the next 100 years, but that is not my problem. My problem is that with Arafat gone, we might start killing each other."