In his workshop in suburban Beirut, Raef Hammoudi has been more than usually busy painting Israeli and US flags, so high is the demand from people demonstrating in support of the new Palestinian intifada. He does them on non-absorbent cloth just an hour or so before they are due for ritual burning because, he says, "I can't stand them in my shop and they disgust my clients."
Lebanon, as the freest and politically most diverse of Arab countries, is the most eloquent sounding-board of Arab and Muslim emotions. True to form, it was the first to react to the Palestinian drama, with those twin villains, Israel and US, more automatically linked than ever as the target of the demonstrators' wrath.
But, this time, Lebanon has been far from alone. The protests sweeping the Arab world these days are by far the most persistent and widespread for many a year, even reminiscent, some say, of the 1950s and '60s, when President Nasser, the pan-Arab champion, used to rouse the masses from the Gulf to the Atlantic.
In Egypt, university students have been staging daily protest marches and sit-ins for nearly two weeks now. Some demonstrations, liked those in Baghdad, were state-sponsored. But most, like one, of particular significance, in tightly-controlled Syria, were spontaneous; last week 4,000 people stoned the heavily fortified US embassy, scaled its walls and tore down its flag, chanting "Jerusalem is ours", "Down with America, Down with Israel."
There have been demonstrations in Tunis, Sudan, Libya, Morocco, Yemen and Jordan. But, most strikingly, the protest has also spread to the Gulf, where there is little tradition of street protest. In Oman, a huge throng of students at Sultan Qabous University shouted "with our souls and blood we shall redeem you, al-Aqsa". They demanded the closure of the Israeli trade mission in their country: and on Thursday the government obliged.
The protests reached even into Saudi Arabia, heartland of archconservative authoritarianism; thousands burned Israeli and American flags in the streets of Sakakah in the kingdom's remote north. In Kuwait, where popular anti-Palestinian sentiment runs deep, Islamists led a march for Palestine.
There is often a religious flavour to the outrage, be it Muhammad Tantawi, Sheikh of Cairo's al-Azhar University, decreeing - in the name of establishment Islam - that "force must now be our only weapon to confront Israel", or the 55 personalities, from Malaysia to Morocco, who - in the name of militant, fundamentalist Islam - have issued a joint declaration proclaiming that Israel's arrogance would never have reached the dimension it did were it not for "Arab submissiveness and willingness to give in, instead of pursuing the path of the intifada, resistance and struggle to liberate every handspan of Palestine." But conventional patriotism, instinctive fellow-feeling with Palestinian compatriots, is very much present too.
It is renewed, dramatic testimony to the abiding centrality of Palestine in the Arab psyche. Yet, though this has been the most impressive such outpouring of solidarity for years, the fact is that the same thing has been seen, in one form or another, time and time again. And, repeatedly, emotion has failed to translate into serious action. Palestine may be a great rallying-cry, but, to many Arabs, it is also a badge of shame, a prime symptom of weakness and disarray, of the rottenness and corruption of an Arab world once again reminded, by the spectacle of Palestinian youths dying in unequal combat, that, for all its wealth, numbers and geographic immensity, it is quite unable to check the excesses of the historic foe. The anathemas heaped on Israel/America may be genuinely felt, but, beneath them, lies another, perhaps more significant emotion: self-disgust, a profound exasperation with this Arab impotence, and above all with regimes which are the chief expression of it. That emotion has long been an intrinsic part of the contemporary Arab condition: but it always breaks surface on occasions like this, not so much in the demonstrations, as in the lamentations of the Arab media.
The fate of Muhammad Durra, the 12-year-old boy shot to death on the world's television screens, had a very special resonance. Like other obituarists, Sawsang al-Shaer wrote in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Watan that not just Israeli soldiers, the Arabs themselves, had the child's blood on their hands. "Do you remember", she asked, "TV footage of Israeli soldiers breaking the bones of Palestinian youth during the intifada a few years back?
"Didn't we fume and revolt and threaten? What happened afterwards? Nothing. Didn't the sight of Muhammad appal everyone of us? What will happen now? Nothing! Look what happened to oil prices. They (the West) made their views known openly, taking no heed of our reaction because they knew there would be none! Muhammad was killed before our eyes. But they're not to blame. We are - because we sell ourselves cheap."
The Arab leaders have finally decided to convene a summit conference to deal with the crisis. But will it yield any results? Arab commentators are almost unanimously saying that this time it had better - or else.
The growing anger of the Arab "street", the passionate rhetoric of the intelligentsia, does seem to have begun seriously to alarm Arab leaders.
President Mubarak, who, to general derision, first proposed an "emergency" summit to be held no sooner than January, brought it forward to October 21st. Popular pressure did it. He himself has come under rare, direct criticism in Egypt's so-called opposition newspapers. "The Egyptian people are angry, Mr President," said the editor of al-Wafd. "We demand the breaking of relations with Israel. It is the minimum the people will accept."
Even the very official, state-controlled press is sounding militant too. Ahmad Ragab, perhaps Egypt's most popular columnist, said in al-Akhbar that the Arabs should and could use "the oil weapon" to free Jerusalem, especially with an energy crisis looming in the West. Instead, he added sarcastically, they have "placed their oil under the protection of William Cohen, the US secretary for the defence of Israel".
Saudi Arabia has agreed to attend the summit, thereby defying the US pressures which are said to be a key reason for its traditional reluctance to do so. But, more dramatically, Iraq has been invited too. Following the competitive stampede of Arab civilian aircraft converging on Baghdad, that represents another breakthrough in President Saddam Hussein's quest for international rehabilitation. He is in exultant, belligerent mood, yesterday moving troops up to his border with Jordan. In language not far removed from his notorious "I-will-burn-half-of-Israel" speech on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait, he said this week: "You see how many Arab kings and presidents we have, yet five million worthless people [the Israelis] oppress our people in Palestine and slaughter our children. Let them give Iraq a small adjacent piece of land and they'll see how quickly we finish off Zionism."
There was a time when Palestine, as the Arab cause par excellence, had the power to topple regimes and foment revolution. Some now openly hope it could do so again. In the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, leading platform of Arab opposition movements, Abd al-Bari alAtwan wrote: "Mrs Albright is doing her best to restore calm for the sake of Israeli and US interests. She knows that the countdown to the end of US hegemony over the region has started and that the spread of disturbances to Arab streets could shake Arab regimes that take orders from Washington and lead to a worldwide energy crisis. . .
"We pray to God to prolong the intifada, turn it into the trigger that will stir the Arab street to give vent to its accumulated frustrations - for there is more than one Milosevic in the Arab world."