This year April 9 was the day when Israelis remembered the Nazi Holocaust that took the lives of some 11 million human souls (not counting the combat casualties), about six million of whom were Jewish. It was also the day when Palestinians remembered the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, when Menachem Begin's Irgun militia descended upon an Arab village and killed some 260 men, women and children, dumping their bodies into a well.

On April 9 Israeli forces were firing on the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; Shin Bet death squads went around executing suspected terrorists, and Palestinian death squads went around executing suspected collaborators on the streets of the West Bank; and desperate young Palestinians were planning their martyrdom in further atrocious suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.

In Panama, more than 2,000 people, including a large percentage of this country's small Palestinian community, a strong representation from the Panamanian left and a number of non-Palestinian Arabs and non-Arab Muslims, marched from the University of Panama campus to the Israeli Embassy to protest the Israeli offensive in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The signs and speeches denounced Ariel Sharon as a war criminal, not only for the current wave of violence but also for the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut, where then-Defense Minister Sharon ordered his troops to surround the camps and a Lebanese neo-fascist militia allied with Israel was sent in and killed some 3,600 non-combatant civilians of all ages and both genders. It also happened that two days after the march to the Israeli Embassy, the last ratifications needed to approve a permanent World Criminal Court were obtained. Calls to bring Sharon to trial before such a tribunal to face accusations of crimes against humanity were a recurrent theme at the April 9 protest.

The day's most eloquent plea, however, came from an eight-year-old boy, Abdel Hamid Ansur. "We're here to tell the Israelis and the Americans 'Enough!'," he said. "Where is the respect for human rights? We are human beings and we have a right to live," the young Palestinian-Panamanian asserted.

Hundreds of police officers were mobilized for the protest, and about a half-hour before the marchers arrived Israeli diplomats took down their country's flag and were escorted away from the embassy on Manuel Icaza by the SPI Panamanian presidential guards.

The Panamanian and Palestinian flags were the principal symbols at the march, and more than one comparison was made to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the former US control over the Canal Zone.

Two Zionists staged a silent counter-protest and elicited angry responses from some, but the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which is headed by Colon Free Zone merchant Walid Sayed, urged the pro-Palestinian demonstrators not to molest the young Israel supporters and the call was heeded. There was no violence of any sort at the protest.

Solidarity with Palestine is not a bread-and-butter issue for the Panamanian working class, but nevertheless the militant SUNTRACS construction workers' union was represented at the protest.

The main themes of the anti-Israeli protest were anguish and anger, but hope for better times for a younger generation was also evident.

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