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Palestinians Reconquer East Jerusalem For An Afternoon
JERUSALEM, June 1 (News Agencies) - His face covered by a keffieh headdress, a young Palestinian reaches up on a poll in front of the walls of Jerusalem's Old City and attacks three Israeli surveillance cameras, to the cheers of thousands.
Unlike most days, not a single uniformed Israeli was in sight Friday, as if east Jerusalem, the Arab part of the holy city that has been held by Israel since 1967, had been handed to the Palestinians in a day.
"This is like before 1967. There aren't any Jews, no Israelis," exclaimed a cheerful Mohammed Liftawi, a souvenir seller in the Old City.
Officially, the crowd is here to bury Faisal al-Husseini, the top Palestinian official for Jerusalem, who died the day before on a visit to Kuwait.
But the funeral, which left in the morning from the West Bank city of Ramallah, 15 kilometers (nine miles) to the north, is also a demonstration of Palestinian nationalism.
Thousands take the body to the Orient House, Husseini's Jerusalem office, and proceed on toward the al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site and the most disputed point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The demonstrators, most of them young people, pass by Israel's justice ministry on Saladan Street, a major commercial strip in east Jerusalem, and chant: "The Intifada will continue until liberation."
On top of the building are stationed three Israeli guards, one of them uniformed, who study the crowd but do not move.
Leading the procession are the khaki uniforms, red caps, and the red and yellow veils and shoulder straps of the Palestinian scouts, one of whom is pounding at a drum.
Damascus Gate, the entrance to the Old City, is in sight. On top of the wall, demonstrators wave Palestinian flags.
And still not a single police or border guard is seen, Israeli authorities wisely choosing to stay far away and avoiding any major incidents.
Al-Aqsa, after all, is where eight months of deadly Israeli-Palestinian violence erupted, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then right-wing opposition leader, visited the mosque compound, which lies atop the most sacred site in Judaism.
Husseini's body comes out of the ambulance and is carried above the shoulders by mourners across the Muslim quarter, almost running over the few children or old people who did not have the good sense to stay out of the way.
"Allah Akbar," or "God is Greatest," the demonstrators chant. "Jerusalem is Ours!" they add, and "Jerusalem is Arab!"
Some residents spray the crowd with water to make the desert wind more bearable. Several mourners slump onto the wall, on the point of passing out.
The crowd continues its procession, not taking notice of the three Israeli flags flying proudly above homes bought by Jews in the Muslim quarter.
A little further, young masked Palestinians stop to destroy some more surveillance cameras, a hated symbol of Israeli rule.
The procession continues into the mosque compound, known to Arabs as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. Thousands of Palestinians, many of them of old age, wait for the body.
The coffin is taken up to the entrance of the al-Aqsa mosque, whose front wall is decorated by a gigantic Palestinian flag, which some in the crowd try to touch.
The body is then taken for burial to the funerary chamber in the walls of the mosque compound, where the crowd chants verses from the Holy Qur'an.
And then, Husseini is buried, the first since 1967 in the cemetery, next to his father, Abdel Qader Husseini, a resistance fighter who died as a hero in the battle against Israel for Jerusalem in 1948, and his grandfather. All three generations of struggle lying beside each other.
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