PALESTINE, PEACE ON HIS MIND.

Byline: Storer H. Rowley Chicago Tribune 

For Palestinian distance runner Majed Abu Marahil, winning medals isn't everything. Just participating in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta will be as good as gold for him and the Palestinian struggle.

For years, Abu Marahil trained in obscurity, running along beaches and garbage-strewn roads in the impoverished Gaza Strip, living under Israeli occupation and never dreaming he might one day be the first athlete to represent the Palestinians at the Olympic Games.

Then came the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat returned triumphantly to Gaza in 1994, bringing self-rule and the real hope that Palestinians might one day achieve their dream of statehood.

Now Abu Marahil has been tapped to carry the red, white, green and black Palestinian flag around Atlanta's Olympic Stadium in the opening ceremony of the first Olympics to host a Palestinian team. At least two other Palestinian runners are to accompany him to Atlanta to represent Arafat's fledgling autonomous territory, officials said.

``I don't know if I will be able to carry the flag and keep walking,'' said the amiable, modest Marahil, 32, a devout Muslim and a father of five who serves on Arafat's elite Force 17 bodyguard unit and is still somewhat awed by his mission to the Summer Games.

``Millions of Palestinian people will follow the flag with their eyes. It's a big responsibility,'' added the tall, muscular Gazan, whose first love has always been running.

``I just want to prove to the whole world that we, the Palestinians, despite all the pressures, all the obstacles, all the hardships we faced, that we can manage to reach the top of the pyramid, and to say to the whole world that we are a civilized nation that exists on the world map.''

Abu Marahil knows that his personal best of about 30 minutes in the 10,000-meter race is some three minutes longer than the world and Olympic records for the event, but that almost seems secondary to his main goals.

He will be running to re-establish the name of Palestine as an entity finally accepted equally among nations in an international arena. Like ancient Greeks who halted wars to hold their games, he will be running for peace. He also runs for a better Palestinian future and to erase the stigma of Munich.

Born in the Nusseirat refugee camp to parents who fled from Beersheba to Gaza, Abu Marahil was a boy when Palestinian guerrillas hijacked the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and killed 11 Israeli athletes and officials. After that, Palestinians remained outcasts barred from the Olympics.

But Abu Marahil shunned politics as he grew up, ever supporting Arafat's Fatah faction but always more interested in sports than revenge. He took no part actively in the intifada, the stone-throwing Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that raged from 1987 to 1993.

``I never threw stones in the intifada. For me, to go to the Olympics and raise the Palestinian flag, it is a great and definite sign that there will be peace in the region, and I support peace,'' said Marahil, speaking in Arabic one recent day at his Force 17 tent post near Arafat's beachside headquarters.

``For me, it has a peaceful meaning, and this is the message I take to the world in the Olympics,'' he added, dressed in green camouflage fatigues, his eyes focusing intensely under a head of curly black hair with a few patches of gray.

``I'm like every Palestinian and every Palestinian family who lost someone in the intifada, or had someone hurt or in jail,'' he added. ``As for Israel, Israel is a fact, and we have to accept it as a fact. And we have to live close to each other.

``But I don't think I'll have to face any Israelis in the 10,000 meters in Atlanta,'' he added with a relieved smile.

These days, he is a celebrity in Gaza, drawing a throng of children behind him when he runs on the beach and constantly being stopped by admirers who want a snapshot.

Palestinians have been sports enthusiasts for decades, and their athletes thrived under the British mandate in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s at soccer and other sports, according to Ahmad Tawfeeq Hosni Alyazji, deputy minister of sport and youth for Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

But after Israel won independence in 1948 and captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six Day War, Palestinians had to be content with jobs as coaches and trainers in other countries. Their athletes could only participate in international sports events under the umbrella of other Arab nations, Alyazji said.

``For Palestinian sports people, Atlanta is our first chance to send a message to the world and the United States that the Palestinian people - instead of hate, violence and killing - are seeking to return to normal life,'' he added. ``And the best way to do that is through youth and sport.

``Munich in 1972 is a part of our history. In every nation and every people who feel strangled or are under pressure, there are people who do things,'' he explained. ``We want to present a new face in Atlanta. Not the bloody face, but a new face.''

Still, for Palestinian athletes in the West Bank and Gaza the going is tough despite the peace process, and their local teams cannot travel between those places to compete in regular events.

Under the Oslo accords, Israel agreed to allow a safe-passage route between Gaza and the West Bank, but a series of suicide bombings by Islamic extremists killed 59 people in Israel earlier this year and the Jewish state clamped a tight closure on the territories, forbidding most travel.

Palestinian athletes and teams also have a hard time getting Israeli permission to travel to international sports events. Alyazji said he wants to ``solve the problem of Hamas and Islamic Jihad through sports,'' but his ability to convince such young Muslim extremists that the peace process will benefit them is hampered by a lack of resources.

``After the strangulation and isolation of 30 years, we are asking the help of the world,'' he said, noting that his annual budget of $2.5 million is far too small to provide facilities and services.