A report of my recent trip to Cairo for the Global March to Gaza and lessons for organizing back home

In early June, it had been months since Israel had allowed any humanitarian aid into Gaza, except through the disastrous killing sites set up through the American-Israeli private venture “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, transparently designed by Israel to weaponize Gazans’ desperate hunger (manufactured by Israel itself) to ethnically cleanse them from their land. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s Madleen had set sail to try to break the siege, an effort everyone knew was futile, and not a thousandth of what would be necessary to feed Gaza for a single day. It was in this context that I first heard the call for a Global March to Gaza from Cairo, and my initial response was, “that’s nuts”. There are hundreds of miles of desert between Cairo and Rafah. I later learned that the march itself was meant to start from el-`Arish on the Mediterranean coast, which, although it made the march more physically feasible, seemed no less fanciful.

In 2009, I was living in Cairo as Israel subjected Gaza to what at the time was the most brutal and deadly attack and siege in its modern history, and Egypt was very much seen to be culpable in the maintenance of that siege. A German-Egyptian friend, Philip Rizk, helped organize a similar march to Gaza to raise attention to the role of the Egyptian authorities in the siege on Gaza. He was kidnapped and held incommunicado for several days for his troubles. I was skeptical that the Global March to Gaza would have greater success.

But I read further and noticed the diplomatic approach that the Global March to Gaza (GMTG) was taking and the lengths they went to to try to assuage any feelings of embarrassment the Egyptian authorities might feel at being put in this position again. I also noticed the numbers of participants continuing to climb, and the jubilant and determined departure of the Sumoud convoy from Tunisia, comprising some 1,500 people traveling across North Africa to Gaza. I learned the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were putting some organizational heft behind the effort. And meanwhile Israel continued to starve, murder, and displace Gazans in what was taking shape as their final solution (with no apparent sense of irony) to Israel’s demographic problem—which is to say, the stubborn existence of Palestinians indigenous to the land. We had all hit so many walls in our activism in the US, and something had to be done.

I learned in greater detail about the status of the north Sinai—through which we were meant to march—as a closed military zone, difficult to access even for its residents, thanks in part to ongoing armed skirmishes between the Egyptian government and the local al-Qaeda affiliate. But the swelling numbers of participants in the March and urgency of the situation in Gaza gave me some hope that some “space of exception” might be opened up, at least enough to break through international paralysis, if not the border itself. The Egyptian government declined to respond forthrightly to the organizers’ requests to pass, leaving them and participants to scan for clues and hints as to its orientation toward the march. On June 7th, the English edition of Al Ahram newspaper, the Egyptian state media organ, published a positive article about the GMTG, giving a hopeful indication of the official attitude. So I signed up, suspended judgement through my first messy online meeting with the US delegation of the march, and made hasty arrangements with work and partner and activist colleagues to fly to Cairo.

The challenges began to make themselves evident even before we departed, as word came down that some folks were being detained and deported, and we should avoid traveling in obvious groups, and definitely keep Palestinian paraphernalia under wraps. Half a dozen of us met at JFK, but, in what would become a corrosive pattern for the rest of the event, we soon broke off and pretended not to know one another.

Upon arriving at the Cairo airport the next day, further complications presented themselves as soon as we entered the passport control hall. As I purchased my visa sticker, a francophone contingent broke into chants of “Free Free Palestine!” while their comrades were shoved into a detention room whose modular walls shook with those inside demanding release, and animated arguments took place outside with authorities who were clearly not accustomed to having their authority questioned. We continued to renounce association with such rabble-rousers and were rewarded with swift passage through passport control and into the country as a result. Many of the folks I traveled with I would only ever again encounter on Signal chats. In the end, I learned that 200 March participants (out of a couple thousand that made it to Cairo) had been detained, and dozens deported from the airport.

That evening, organizers delayed our departure time without explanation from 8am to noon the following day. The plan had been to board buses at some as-yet-undisclosed location near the downtown hotels where we were almost all staying. The morning, however, found the entire downtown area packed to the gills with ‘Amn ad-Dawla (the feared State Security forces) in riot gear, and tanks and personnel carriers at every intersection and along every thoroughfare, particularly at Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the January 25th, 2011 Revolution. This level of security presence in downtown Cairo had not been seen since that revolution and the coup that followed two years later. 

In late morning, word came from organizers to pivot and find transportation by taxi or rideshare app to Ismailia, a city on the west side of the Suez canal, on the way to el-`Arish, but not in the Sinai Peninsula. People were discouraged from traveling alone, but there had not been any prior organization to form groups. After a while of paralysis and working up the courage to venture outside, I made my way to the hostel where some JVP colleagues I’d met at JFK were staying, walking back streets with all my bags (we were meant to be camping after all) and avoiding congregations of police. I ordered a DiDi (like Über, but no credit card required) and we set off to Ismailia. We got to a toll-booth/checkpoint and there was a fair amount of traffic and chaos. Word on the Signal chats was that some folks had been detained there, so I deleted Signal to avoid having my messages read, and then re-installed after passing through safely. This process left my contacts intact, but my message history lost, another impediment to consistent and reliable communications while in Egypt.

We learned that there was at least one more checkpoint. At the second, traffic was completely stopped. Car-loads of internationals were walking around, and it became clear that an impromptu protest camp was forming. We debated in our car about whether we should get out as well, hearing that few were making it past this checkpoint. Our driver dissuaded us, telling us that there was no transportation from here, and we’d be stranded. The traffic eventually started moving at a crawl, with all traffic, Egyptian and otherwise, being turned back to Cairo. We saw Palestinian flags and chanting, and stayed put, out of fear of our own safety, and that of our driver, and no small amount of cowardice, at least on my own part. Our driver had his ID taken by police, and after turning around, had to get out and run across the highway to retrieve it. After learning en route that march organizers had instructed people to stay in Cairo if they were still there or return if possible, we made it back to Cairo with our passports still in our possession and not yet marked by authorities as trouble-makers. Our driver was stopped and his ID checked twice by traffic police en route back to Cairo.

Upon our return to Cairo, word began to come out that those few who had made it all the way to Ismailia were subjected to beatings and loaded on buses back to Cairo for deportation. The hundreds that had assembled at the second checkpoint on the Ismailia road began to stage a sit-in and also faced rough treatment from police who seemed to have little training in (or use for) the more nuanced crowd-control (read: counterinsurgency) tactics of US police departments.

As the daylight dimmed, the treatment got rougher still. Videos later emerged of activists beset upon by the thugs hired by Egyptian security forces, a practice going back at least to the Mubarak regime. They’re referred to in Egypt as the “baltageya” (بلطجية), which translates literally in Egyptian colloquial Arabic to “baton mongers”. Just as the night call to prayer sounded outside my hotel window, Signal messages came through that authorities had turned off the lights and arrests began in earnest, marking a rare moment of predictability (Egyptian authorities are known to move forcefully to quash protests at nightfall) in an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable official response to the GMTG.

We later learned that these folks had their passports photographed and were bussed back to Cairo, many unceremoniously let loose on downtown streets and in front of hotels whose staff could be counted upon by Egyptian authorities to observe and report upon their patrons’ movements.

The next day, word came early that march participants were being surveilled and questioned on the streets, hotels were being raided (in some cases by officers in plainclothes who had arrested them the previous night in uniform), and folks were being deported. I stayed put in my apparently safe hotel, eating breakfast on the 10th floor restaurant patio looking West toward the Nile, fretting about other obvious march participants in their kufiyyas openly talking about the march. I stayed mum.

A combination of outrage and recriminations with smatterings of grace and patience filled the Signal chats as people expressed their frustrations with the poor communication of march organizers, and the way people and their Egyptian drivers were put in harm’s way by the last-minute pivot to Ismailia. Leadership had apparently banked on being able to gather and coordinate to develop better systems in person once everyone was on the ground and face-to-face. Having been thwarted in gathering face-to-face, we huddled individually and in small groups in our hotel rooms and hostel lounges (and a hospital room in at least one case) and set about trying to wrangle this inchoate mass of thousands (150–200 in the US delegation alone) into a semblance of organization, crafting organizational charts and moderating Zoom calls using burner phones running iffy SIMs with WiFi or mobile date over VPNs and trying to coordinate over un-threaded Signal chats. The conditions were less than ideal, to put it mildly.

We held a fruitful Q&A with an Egyptian lawyer about the constraints to organizers working in Egypt (including a prohibition against gatherings of more than 5 people, per the 2013 Protest Law), and the dangers that our work could pose to Egyptian activists who have to live with the increased repression, long after we’ve landed back in our home countries. We solidified regional coordinating groups to brainstorm alternate courses of action, a US coordinating council of those groups to vet those proposals, and an international council of national delegations (maybe 40 of them?) to consider them for the whole march. A new US delegation leader was chosen by international organizers to helm the US delegation to supplement the severely overworked previous head, who continued to perform the vital background work of supporting hundreds of people who knew neither one another nor much about the country they suddenly found themselves in.

Many, having obviously signed up to march to Gaza, were insistent on carrying on with that course of action, despite the clear opposition of the Egyptian authorities and the strong likelihood of immediate arrest and deportation. Other ideas ranged from a public press conference with participants in attendance, to taking advantage of the traditional exception for weddings to the usual prohibition against unpermitted public gatherings. I was particularly in favor of the latter: after all, I’ve never experienced a collective action of thousands of people, even in such atomizing conditions as these, that didn’t result in someone hooking up. Why not take advantage of the fact to make ourselves into a wedding procession to Gaza? Several people indeed stepped up to sacrifice themselves on the nuptial altar for the cause.

National delegates, however, decided against those strategies and instead organized meetings of national delegations with their respective ambassadors to press them to urge the Egyptian authorities to grant us passage to Rafah. Many delegations were able to meet with their ambassadors more or less immediately, and several received positive responses. Many of the ambassadors themselves subsequently met to confer. The US delegation was not able to meet with their ambassador until a day later, with a surprisingly warm reception, but less than encouraging response. By that point, with a pessimistic response from the collective of ambassadors, the decision had basically been made to abandon efforts in Egypt and arrange instead to meet up with the Sumoud convoy. The latter had by then already faced similarly staunch resistance and repression from the de facto authorities in eastern Libya (themselves backed by Egypt) and were on their way back to Tunis.

Work pivoted to organizing the logistics to get as many people as were willing to Tunisia, where we would at least have freedom of movement and assembly. As that work proceeded, Saif Abukeshek, the lead organizer of the GMTG, along with two Norwegian march participants, was abducted from a cafe in Cairo and beaten in detention. The Norwegians were released quickly, but Saif was held incommunicado for some time. In light of the clearly antagonistic attitude of the Egytian authorities toward the march, national delegate leaders urged participants to leave the country as quickly as possible.

I and a small group of other participants took our chances to fight against efforts to keep us isolated and at least gather socially, first as the announcement from leadership came, and again the next evening, largely doing safe and touristy things until we could arrange flights home.

In the end, while it was difficult to meet face-to-face without incurring the wrath of Egyptian authorities, I spent nearly every hour of every day, and many sleepless nights, in virtual meetings and conversations with over a hundred Americans from all walks of life who came across an ocean to put their bodies on the line to put a stop to this madness and barbarism. We did all this knowing that people coming from 80 other nations were with us in Egypt doing the same.

Since I’ve returned, many people have asked me why the Egyptian government came down on the march so hard: “doesn’t Egypt support a free Palestine?” The vast majority of the Egyptian people support a free Palestine and are horrified at the genocide and siege of Gaza, but the Egyptian government receives at least $5 billion dollars in aid from the US each year in return for normalized relations with Israel, going back to the 1978 Camp David accords. A great deal of that aid goes toward the purchase of American military equipment (which supports the US economy) that has little use aside from “disciplining” Egypt’s own domestic opposition and its generally restive and dissatisfied population. Notably, much of that dissatisfaction stems from Egypt’s lukewarm support—if it can be called that—for Palestine. Much more of that US aid goes toward propping up the military regime that carries out that discipline. In Egypt, as nearly everywhere across the globe, Palestine represents a major crack in the regime’s legitimacy, and exposes it as a tool of the American-Israeli alliance.

I am sorry to say that we underestimated the forces arrayed against us, and just how far and how deeply the evil of American and Israeli influence extends beyond their recognized borders.

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Much more can be said about the shape of the organizing and the facts of what happened in the background, and it would be easy to pin the challenges that kept us from coming together and marching to Gaza on the shortcomings of the march’s leadership. There is a tendency to look at the chaos, the disorganization, the communications breakdowns, the silos, the atomization, and to put them largely at the feet of GMTG leadership and the structures (or lack thereof) created by them. Surely, there are better models that could have been implemented, and better preparation and training would have gone a long way. But I think it is imperative that we undertake a clear-eyed evaluation of what organizing under extreme repression and under intense urgency actually does to a movement and its participants. 

We felt alone because we were meant by a repressive apparatus to be isolated and atomized. We felt dysregulated and crazed because we were meant to lose touch with the things that keep us sane (perhaps foremost among them, sleep). We felt dislocated because we were meant to be torn from the ground beneath our feet. Our Signal chats became toxic pits of mudslinging and bullying and bad-jacketing because we were never meant to actually find each other in Cairo.

And yet, despite all the Egyptian authorities’ best efforts, we did find each other. Perhaps not on the scale that we had hoped, or in the venue we had planned, or to the ends we had in mind, but we defied the efforts to prevent us from associating freely to meet one another, to comfort one another, to find and build common ground, and even our toxic Signal chats were repeatedly turned into spaces of love and celebration by the skillful intervention of community healers and conveners.

To me, what is most important to recognize from this effort is that the challenges, internal and external, that we faced in Cairo are by no means unique to Egypt, and the experience contains lessons for organizing in the US, even in little ol’ Brattleboro, Vermont, where I live:

• First, the US’s much-vaunted (and unevenly distributed) freedoms of speech and assembly are vitally important and not to be taken for granted, nor—most importantly—to be allowed to simply sit on a shelf for use at some future date. These freedoms are not shelf-stable and will expire if not used. Freedom of speech and assembly is not just for petitioning the government, but more fundamentally for finding one another and building power together.  Symbolic mass mobilizations are important—a fact made clear in trying to operate in a country that wouldn’t allow even that—but they are not sufficient.  We need to use what rights of speech and assembly we still have to go beyond symbolism and build the power we need to change the systems we live in.
• Secondly, on finding one another and building power, United Statesians (myself included) tend to be allergic to joining organizations. We need to get over this. One of the largest internal challenges of the GMTG was the lack of support individual participants could draw upon from organizations at home, forcing the structure hastily cobbled together by GMTG leadership to take on that work, without the capacity to do so.  In times of increasing authoritarianism, we need to find our people and get into formation.  Join a national organization like Jewish Voice for Peace, or a local one like Southern Vermont for Palestine; support Palestinian-led organizations like Palestinian Youth Movement; build a local ICE community defense group; start a mutual aid network to support your neighbors who are getting food and housing benefits cut; activate an affinity group with a crew you already know and trust and make some good trouble. In the words of social justice leader Grace Lee Boggs, “movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”  Whatever feels like it draws you, make the extra effort and do it—we need as many forms of organization and as deep connections as possible right now. 
• Thirdly, on the subject of not allowing freedom of speech and assembly to spoil on the shelf, we need to have started our people on a curriculum of movement training years ago. The second-best time to do so, however, is right now. It doesn’t require a cartoonishly repressive regime such as Egypt’s to keep people atomized and powerless; US counterinsurgency is far more subtle, and at least as effective. It is not easy and automatic for us to find one another, much less to build power together, and we are thwarted at every turn, even with the 1st Amendment on the books. We need training to
  • learn how to bring people together, whether it is in affinity groups, mutual-interest organizations, or mass organizations
  • effectively facilitate finding one another and building power through those groups and organizations
  • develop the collective political analysis, critical thinking, and discernment necessary for these groups and organizations to grow and evolve and effect meaningful change in our conditions.

These trainings exist but can be hard to find outside of existing left infrastructure and we need to make them much more widely available.  Seek one out and bring it to your town or city if nothing is happening near you!  

• Check out the Freedom Trainers for workshops and resources on how other countries have defeated authoritarianism with the power of non-cooperation
• Go to an organizing training with Momentum or Training for Change or Midwest Academy or the Organizing Center
• Start a book club with your favorite list of movement titles.

Trying to organize in a country where the basic freedoms many of us take for granted were so severely curtailed makes it frighteningly easy to see where our country could be going, and we need to build the skills, analysis, and connections we’ll need while we still can.  GMTG is currently going through a process of self-evaluation to discern how they might have better anticipated and met the repression we faced in Egypt. We would do well not to wait until the repression has reached this level at home to do the same.

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But a final point needs to be made. Palestine remains the issue of our time. It’s a slogan that bears repeating: a free Palestine will free us all. Despite my focus on the challenges we faced in Egypt and the lessons for organizing in the US, Palestine and Palestinians continue to teach us the nature of our common oppression, and the way to confront it. Palestine is the deepest, longest crack in a seemingly impenetrable firmament of oppression, one that is shot through with fissures of contradictions and hidden spaces of resistance. The Global March to Gaza was one hammer strike among many to widen that crack further and reduce to a crumbling pile of rubble this boulder standing in the way of human progress on a living planet. Let’s keep these strikes coming!