Several thousand Israeli Arabs marched through the streets of Nazareth on Saturday in a symbolic funeral for Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. Tens of thousands of Palestinians had attended Arafat's burial in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday in a chaotic scene of grief and gunfire.
The Arabs who comprise about one-fifth of the population of the Jewish state feel closely linked to their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
"The death of the Palestinian leader is also the death of a symbol of the struggle for freedom. We are part of the Palestinian people and we share in the grief," Nazareth Mayor Ramez Jaraisi told Reuters.
Jaraisi walked at the front of the procession through the narrow streets of the town, locking arms with Arab members of Israel's parliament.
Mourners unfurled a large red, black and green Palestinian flag and held aloft pictures of Arafat, chanting: "We will give our souls and our blood for Abu Ammar".
Israeli Arabs' support for the four-year-old uprising has been mainly political. Israeli forces killed 13 Arab citizens in demonstrations during the early days of unrest, and several dozen have been arrested on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers.
Some of the Arabs who had lived in British-mandate Palestine became citizens of the Jewish state after its emergence in 1948, while many of their kin became refugees in the West Bank, Gaza and abroad during the war that erupted over Israel's birth.
"Yasser Arafat is a leader of all Palestinians: inside Israel, in exile and in the West Bank and Gaza," said Osama Saadi, a lawyer from the Galilee village of Arrabeh. "There is overwhelming sorrow at his loss."