Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Tens of thousands of Palestinians lined the streets of Jerusalem Friday to pay their last respects to leading PLO official Faisal Husseini, once slated a likely successor to Yasser Arafat.
Arafat earlier accused Israel of responsibility for Husseini's death of a massive heart attack in a hotel room in Kuwait early Thursday.
Husseini's body was flown to Amman, Jordan where Arafat and relatives met the coffin and accompanied it to PA-controlled Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.
Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer permitted Palestinian Authority VIPs and close relatives of Husseini to enter Jerusalem from the West Bank for the funeral.
Israeli officials said Arafat himself had not requested permission to enter the city from the disputed areas, which have been virtually sealed off during the last eight months of trouble.
The scion of a prominent local Arab family, Husseini was the PLO's highest-ranking official in Jerusalem and the PA's minister responsible for Jerusalem affairs.
He led the PA struggle for control of the eastern section of the city in the hope it would become the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Arafat eulogized Husseini as a "champion of the Palestinians in Jerusalem" and hailed him as a "martyr."
Earlier he told reporters in Belgium that Israel was responsible for Husseini's death.
"There is no doubt that the [tear gas] canisters thrown at him by the Israeli forces led to his death," Arafat said, referring to a protest in which Husseini had participated two weeks ago.
A senior advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Ra'anan Gissin, said in reaction it was "not the first time that Arafat or a member of his family has used preposterous and baseless lies of this sort about the use of toxic gas or other poisons per se, which allegedly caused the death of Palestinians.
"This is a sheer lie which serves to systematically incite violence and hate which leads to the kind of hostilities that the Palestinian Authority has instigated for the past eight months," Gissin said.
Husseini was laid to rest next to his father, a military leader who died during the Arabs' battle to prevent the establishment of Israel in 1948, in a small family cemetery at the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary.)
He was the first person to be buried at the site - Judaism's holiest site, and location of the third most sacred mosque in Islam - since the area returned to Israeli control during the 1967 Six Day War.
A chance to make a difference
A self-taught Hebrew speaker, many Israelis have hailed Husseini in his death as a "moderate" because he played a role in the peace process.
Husseini led the Palestinian delegation to the first Middle East conference in Madrid in 1991 but had not participated in recent Israeli-PA talks.
However, professor Barry Rubin of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv said Friday that Husseini's stance did not differ markedly from "hard line" Palestinian thinking.
"The real story is that in public and private he always went along with the [Palestinian] line," Rubin said in a telephone interview. "He never broke with it."
He cited a recent speech in Beirut, in which Husseini said that the real Palestinian goal was to eliminate Israel entirely.
When he died, Husseini was in Kuwait partly to address a non-governmental conference militating against the normalization of relations with Israel.
"The tragedy was that [Husseini] could have made a difference and didn't," Rubin said.
He was revered and respected by the broad spectrum of Palestinians and was in the best position of any Palestinian anywhere in the world to propose an "alternate standpoint" - but he hadn't, Rubin added.
A heritage of hate
Rubin said the Husseini family, steeped in the struggle against the Jews for at least 80 years, came to Jerusalem from Yemen in the 15th century and became prominent under the Turkish Ottoman empire, which reigned until Britain defeated Turkey in World War I.
The British named his second cousin, Haj Amin Husseini, as the Grand Mufti or Islamic religious leader of Jerusalem in the 1920s.
Haj Amin built his position until he became the political leader of the local Arab population, heading the revolt against the British and the Jews.
In 1939, Haj Amin was forced to flee and ended up in Germany. There he worked with the Nazis to organize an army to conquer the Middle East and kill all the Jews, Rubin said.
In 1948, Faisal Husseini's father, Abdul Khader Husseini - the Mufti's cousin - was killed in a battle for a strategic pass along the way to Jerusalem and buried in the family plot at the Temple Mount.
Faisal joined the PLO in 1964 and went to Syria for military training.
He returned to the area to carry out a terrorist struggle but was captured by Israel and imprisoned before he had the chance to carry out any attacks. He was also a key activist in Fatah, Arafat's faction of the PLO.
Faisal was a distant cousin of another Middle East leader, Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat.