The “Arab street” met an intimidating wall of Egyptian riot police after regular prayers Friday and promptly dispersed.
But elsewhere in the Arab world Friday, where the Palestinian-Israeli war continues as a festering issue, tens of thousands demonstrated against Israel, the United States and their own leaders.
In Bahrain, the U.S. Embassy became the target of angry protesters, some of whom broke into the compound yelling “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” The demonstrators hurled gasoline bombs and stones, breaking windows and burning flags before riot police drove them back.
Protests in Arab world
In Beirut, some 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians marched peacefully outside the United Nations headquarters. In Amman, Jordan, however, riot police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse an estimated 6,000 protesters who were trying to march on the Israeli Embassy.
Similar scenes had played out earlier in the week in Egypt, America’s largest Arab ally, as tens of thousands of students, laborers and leftists mounted sometimes violent protests against Israel and the Egyptian government. The outbursts raised fears that popular unrest might spread.
On Friday, a few thousand protesters emerged from the main Al-Azhar Mosque chanting ritual denunciations of Israel. They were quickly surrounded by helmeted police wielding canes and shields as trucks mounted with water cannons were parked nearby.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has a history of allowing periodic political protests to bleed off steam and divert anger over domestic grievances, such as the country’s stagnant economy and half-formed democracy. And ordinary Egyptians in and around Friday’s protest seemed well-aware of the limits of what the government would tolerate.
“We’re not trying to talk to the Egyptian government. We’re trying to send a message to Israel,” said Mahmoud Mohammed, a juice vendor outside the mosque. “Our president is trying to do what he can to gather the forces for peace.”
“We just want the government to open the border and let us go and fight with our brothers in Palestine,” said Ahmed Hamed, an engineer attending the demonstration. “We are capable of stopping this [Israeli assault]. But we promise we will not take Mubarak into a war.”
Mubarak’s approach backed
Mubarak lashed out at Israel’s “inhumane” treatment of Palestinians in a nationally televised speech Thursday. But rather than call for increased confrontation with the Jewish state, as the protesters have been urging, he stressed that “Israel should recognize that right now Arabs are extending a hand of peace.”
Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel, but it has been a cold peace since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in September 2000. It grew colder still this week when Mubarak, in a carefully calibrated diplomatic move, downgraded official Egyptian contacts with Israel but stopped short of expelling the Israeli ambassador or cutting off airline or telephone connections.
The approach makes sense to Magdi Wagdi, a salesman at Emerald’s Jewelry Store in the Khan el Khalili bazaar in the heart of Cairo’s old city.
“We can’t break off relations because then there won’t be any bridge of communications,” he said. “We have to let the world know what is going on in Israel. We have to keep this thin string, because we are the leaders in the Middle East.”
Wagdi says his business has been off by more than half since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States scared off American and European tourists. And he knows that tourism to the region is taking another severe blow with the latest images of suicide bombings, tanks and bloodshed coming out of Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“But the first thing I’m thinking is not what it’s doing to business,” he said. “I’m thinking about my brothers who are being killed.”
The imams at Al-Azhar and other nearby mosques spoke passionately of what they described as the victimization of the Palestinians as their sermons echoed from speakers. But absent from Friday’s protest was any of the anti-Americanism that had been heard during the demonstrations earlier in the week. That did not surprise Hamed.
“All of the people in Egypt love America but they see that America is sleeping,” he said. “The problem with the American people is they don’t know the truth about what is happening in Palestine.”
