Prayers, Protests Show Arabs’ Solidarity

Arabs across the Middle East marked the first anniversary of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation Friday with prayers, protests and silent respect for the hundreds of Palestinians who have died in the conflict.

About 3,000 people, some carrying rifles, marched through the Ein el Hilwa refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The demonstrators burned effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and a mock-up of an Israeli tank bearing the flag of the Jewish state’s main backer, the United States.

Many refugees, languishing in squalid camps for half a century, said the intifada offers their only hope of regaining their land and escaping the misery of the camps.

“It is the one thing that could win our homes back,” Khalid Sobhi, 58, said from his home in a tangle of narrow streets in Beirut’s Mar Elias refugee camp.

Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, former spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group and an authority for Shiite Muslims, urged Palestinians to push on with the uprising and shame the world into acknowledging their demands.

“We want our brothers and relatives in Palestine to continue with the intifada, which forces the world to submit to their cause and weighs down its conscience with the tragedy of the victims of Zionist barbarism,” he said.

In Syria, still technically at war with Israel over the occupied Golan Heights, about 1,000 people marched through Damascus, the capital, in silence in a show of respect for the dead. Others took to the streets and collected donations for the intifada. “All children of the world are born happy except the children of Palestine. They are born to become martyrs,” one banner said.

Iraq, reeling under U.N. sanctions for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, vowed to back the Palestinians, who Iraqi officials said are victims of the same injustice as Baghdad. Protesters burned effigies of Sharon and denounced the U.S. Demonstrators chanted slogans calling for President Saddam Hussein to “liberate Jerusalem” and “blow up Tel Aviv,” the commercial capital of Israel.

In Iran, thousands of mostly hard-line demonstrators marched in Tehran, the capital, chanting, “Death to Israel!” and “Death to America!”

“Israel commits crimes, and America gives it support!” they shouted.

In Yemen, about 6,000 people surged out of mosques and into the center of the capital, Sana, after prayers, marching in support of the intifada. “There is no God but Allah and no enemy but the Jews,” the crowd chanted. “Oh Islamic rulers, no negotiation and no surrender.”

Some marchers bore signs in English reading, “Stop genocide against the Palestinian people.”

In Egypt, however, security forces turned out to deter demonstrations, and mosque preachers--who mention the intifada nearly every week--made only brief references to the anniversary.