Egyptian Intifada

Hosni gets a face lift

The April 6th strike of the Ghazl el-Mahalla textile workers has erupted into nation-wide clashes with the state. The demands of the strike included the raising of the minimum wage for textile workers that hasn't been raised since 1984, that is leading to calls for the raising of the national minimum wage, payment of unpaid bonuses, and prosecution of corrupt management. Leaders of the Islamic Labor Party and Kefaya group, opportunistically and irresponsibly as Hossam el-Hamalawy argues, called for a general strike. On the morning of the strike, troops and police amassed near the factory, the largest of its kind in Egypt's textile industry. Police reportedly occupied the factory on Sunday, but by the afternoon clashes broke out, with live ammunition being fired on strikers and protesters. Strike leadership have been arrested and tortured in American-funded jails. For an indispensable source of information on the movement check 3arabawy frequently.

The Mubarak regime has been facing a rising strike movement in recent years. Similar developments have been happening in Iran. However, in Egypt, middle class grievances have been merging with the growing workers movement and combining with the protests against the regime in its alliance with US imperialism. Currently, the growing frustration with inflation, such as the rising cost of bread, as a result of world-wide rise in commodity prices, the mass arrest of hundreds of Muslim Brothers candidates and other opposition parties leading up to the recent elections, the deepening of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, the deepening of privatization of industries, casualization with the growth in temporary labor contracts, massive corruption and the strengthening of Israeli apartheid and the continuing occupation of Iraq is taking on the character of a wide-ranging political movement to bring down the Mubarak dictatorship. However, state terror has been effective before in preventing such democratic movements from cohering and Egyptian activists are routinely arrested and tortured.

And this is exactly what has been happening. Much of the leadership of the strike, along with a leader of Kefaya, and several well-known bloggers have been arrested and many of them have been tortured. The regime's attempt to occupy the factories and smash the student solidarity demonstrations in Cairo led to tens of thousands fighting back in the streets these last few days. Knowing that elections are a sham, and paralleling a call by the Muslim Brothers for a voter boycott, turnout for the most recent local elections has been estimated at 3%. While the U.S. and British rulers prop-up the dictatorship with billions of dollars in what they say is their fight for democracy, its legitimacy is near zero with its foundations being pulled at brick by brick with the hands of the working and middle classes alike.

To read the NYTimes or Washington Post you would think only when Egyptian bloggers "insult Islam" are they jailed by the regime.

Meanwhile, Egyptian state terror is completely censored from the pages of these papers, let alone such bastions of liberal opinion as openDemocracy, while endless articles stream forth on dictator Robert Mugabe's recent attempts to overturn election results and stay in power by smashing the MDC opposition and the Chinese state's attacks on the new spring for the Tibetan movement. It's important to understand what's going on in Egypt to see why its not on the front page of the rulers' press along with Zimbabwe and Tibet.

Since the early 1990s, the Egyptian government has embarked on a process of neoliberal restructuring involving the selling off of state-owned industries, the introduction of temporary labor contracts or casualization, reduction of subsidies for staples, and cut back on social services. It is a process familiar to the U.S. and around the world that has defined the political climate and social policy for the last 30 years. While street protest against the government, centered around student activity, has been developing since 2002 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, the center of strike activity began in the textile industry in earnest in 2006 and spread quickly from there.

During the 1919 revolution in Egypt the liberal elite Wafd Party rode the rebellion of working people to power, negotiating a deal with British colonial occupation and smashing the early democratic organizations of the workers that were decisive in winning the qualified independence of 1923. The anti-democratic Wafd was politically dependent on British imperialism, the importation of British capital, and the British-installed monarchist stooge. The situation is no different from the liberal elites promoted by today's "progressive" imperialists. Textiles have been a major industry in Egypt going back to the 1930s and 1940s and it was textile workers who played a major role in finally running the Wafd elites out of power.

The rise to power of the radical nationalist Nasser saw the break with British and American imperialism. Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council, or Free Officers, consolidated their power not by smashing the Egyptian working classes' organizations, but by incorporating them into intense state-capitalist development and support from Soviet capital. Like the New Deal in the U.S. or the British Labor Party in Britain, this resulted in the creation of new "progressive" labor law, subsidies and other benifits and compensation. These state-capitalist concessions were made possible through the destruction of any independent political power of Egyptian workers and the incorporation of a union bureaucracy that would help guarantee labor quiet. Once again, working people found a new regime of exploitation.

By the late 1970s the Nasserist state was seeing the first signs of being dismantled. By the 1990s neoliberal political and economic policies had taken fully hold in Egypt, a world-wide phenomenon. The union bureaucracies of the old Nasserist state have helped this neoliberal bonanza for the rich by ensuring that the roots of the Mubarak regime continue to wrap around and strangle any independent democratic movement in Egyptian industry. Egypt is just one more example of how the only relation in today's ruling class ideology to "democracy" (pimped in the NYtimes and flying on the wings of imperialism and "economic reforms") is making sure it doesn't exist.

The strikes of the last two years have been the center of gravity of the movement that has spread out across other industries, including the growing privatized industries, combining with the student movement, and embracing the middle class professional associations, with college professors and doctors going out on strike, and much of the civil service, whose salaries are not keeping up with inflation.

As Mustafa Bassiouny and Omar Said show, a key development has been a return to the central conflict of working people's movements in the effort to build independent national unions rooted in strong workplace democratic committees and to oust the General Federation of Trade Unions attached to the Mubarak regime. The attack on the April 6th strike spilled over into the streets in a direct confrontation. This is an important time in Egypt and the Middle East in general, where democratic struggles are challenging the barbarism of U.S. imperialism, Israeli apartheid and the legacy of "revolutionary" state-capitalism alike.

For more check out this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and Rabab el-Mahdi.

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The Other Wall: Darkness in Gaza

The other wall

In Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, which chronicles his stay with the Palestinian fedayeen in the early 1970s, there is a story about a highly symbolic incident in Beirut. One day, an apparently homeless Palestinian man suddenly showed up in the neighborhood. He smelled bad and seemed to have mental problems. People felt sorry for him and gave him food and money when they could. Shortly after, when the Israeli army invaded Beirut, this same man was standing in the turret of a tank rolling down the street where he played the role of harmless madmen, returned as another kind of madmen, a colonel in a uniform with a grim look on his face. The so-called Palestinian homeless man turned out to be an Israeli intelligence officer, returning during the subsequent invasion with his mask off to wreak mass terror on the civilian population.

In retelling this story, Genet gets at one of the mythic and psychological aspects of settler colonialism: that it is "identical with Power" itself. The power to manipulate the natives in this story is the other side of the colonel's return as a sadistic tormentor. This is possible, according to Genet, because colonialism equates its order with the "beginning" of history itself. The madmen is needed to constantly demonstrate the indestructability of the colonial regime, to continuously reimpose the racial order, and to revitalize the myth that history is either himself or nothing.

This same idea appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; a book in which the living body of Palestine-Israel emerges from its pages today. The settler "is the absolute beginning," says Fanon, who must live by the idea that "This land was created by us" and that "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages." Therefore, "the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by stages." This madman, lost in a delirium of racial phantasms, looms over Gaza today.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded over the border between Gaza and Egypt last week, temporarily breaking the blockade imposed by the U.S., Israeli, European, and Arab regimes. Palestinians fought Egyptian police and later blew up and toppled the border wall. It wasn't only that Palestinians overwhelmed the small police forces, but Egyptian authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak had to claim that he allowed a temporary halt to the siege because, once again, the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and the movement for democracy throughout the Middle East converged.

Once again, the Palestinian struggle strikes a blow against imperialism and white supremacy.

Anti-apartheid protests in Lebanon

The current crisis in Gaza has had the potential to spark off the kind of large demonstrations against Israeli apartheid and the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime that were seen in the spring of 2002. That spring saw the glimpses of a mass movement against the U.S.-supported dictatorship throughout the Middle East. This last week threatened to repeat 2002, with demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and elsewhere. In Cairo, several hundred people were arrested, many of whom were hauled-off to Mubarak's torture chambers with U.S. applause. Meanwhile, a general strike in Lebanon has converged with its own demands, while U.S.-backed right wing gangs have been attacking strikers. The convergence of Egyptian anti-apartheid solidarity and anti-imperialist solidarity with Iraq and Lebanon and the Egyptian labor strike movement has continued to show the possibilities of struggle against the Mubarak regime.

At the same time, the temporary break of the siege in Gaza has been an equally powerful, though uncertain, victory over the depravity of Western imperialism, the apartheid regime, and its Arab vassal states. The U.S. and Israeli strategy of combining what the Washington architects of Central American policy in the 1980s called going "primitive", that is mass killings of the civilian population, with building up the military power of the elites, has failed. Imperialism's public relations advertisements for "democracy" in the Middle East are only more exposed in Palestine-Israel and Lebanon by the popular movements for democracy, where imperialism has not yet been successful in inducing aspects of civil war as it has in Iraq.

The Israeli effort to strengthen the embargo against food, fuel and money into Gaza, has been shown for what it is by the Palestinians. The Israeli government has always used blockades against Palestinian bantustans since it controls them, but since 2006 such embargoes increased in scale. Last week, the government imposed a complete blockade and all power was cut, and darkness overtook Gaza.

The Israeli government says that since homemade rockets continue to be launched from Gaza, it will impose a complete blockade until they stop. 2 people in Sderot were killed recently from these rockets. The NYTimes reports, "Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said he won't allow Gazans to live ordinary lives while Israelis next to Gaza are suffering from daily rocket attacks". So how have Palestinians been doing these last two years living "ordinary lives"?

The blockade has been in place to varying degrees since Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in the beginning of 2006. But that's only part of the story. The Israeli army has coupled this blockade with continued murders and arrests of Palestinian activists and civilians. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, in the last two years the Israeli regime has killed 1030 Palestinians, 193 of which were children. During these two years, 44% of these 1030 dead were civilians. Almost half of all Palestinians killed didn't even have a gun in their hands. In this same time, only 24 Israelis were killed. This doesn't even include the over 1000 civilian dead in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 2006, or the number of brave Lebanese who took up arms to defend their homes and not let the apartheid regime carry out another 20 year occupation.

How to make sense of these sick numbers? Since the second intifada began in 2000, it has challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. This regime has responded by practicing mass terror and the destruction of the Palestinian social fabric itself, while further entrenching its segregationist and displacement policies. While American supplied F-16s, Apache helicopters, and tanks strafe the Palestinian bantustans, soldiers shoot up demonstrations, murdering hundreds of people. Meanwhile, Zionist fascist militias rampage through Palestinian ghettos, destroying shops, cars and crops in the field. It was a policy announced in the very beginning of the second intifada when more than a dozen Palestinians living inside the Green line, so-called Palestinian-Israelis, were shot down for organizing demonstrations in solidarity, while Zionist mobs prowled the streets looking for Palestinians to lynch.

A couple days relief

In the Gaza bantustan in recent years, these practices can only be characterized differently in that they're of a much greater scale. Water, medicines and food have been low and malnutrition and preventable diseases are growing. Since there are no supplies, Gaza's meager textile factories have come to a close and the entrances out of the bantustan are blocked by Israeli soldiers, preventing any further work inside the Green Line. Unemployment is at 75%.

Meanwhile, Israeli Jews live their ordinary lives undisturbed by any of this. Olmert's Orwellian flip is exactly the kind of psychological displacement by the colonial racist mind that Fanon notes in Wretched of the Earth: it is the whites that are under attack, and as for the condition of the native he has only brought upon himself. The scales of violence, therefore, are appropriate in the moral economy of white supremacy. We see this in American newspapers where, if a an Israeli Jew is occasionally killed, there is front page coverage, while every week Palestinians are killed in demonstrations and arrests and they remain unmentioned and faceless. Olmert's comment reveals exactly the calculus of white life as more valuable than non-white life.

This gets at Genet's Israeli madman as colonial sadist. In the social ideology of Zionism, colonial sadism is based on the racial ideas of Arab inferiority and barbarism. The Zionist madman must commit mass state terror because the native not only deserves it, but this is the only way to maintain the racial order in the logic of colonialism and apartheid. Gaza today is only the most extreme example of this dynamic in Palestine-Israel.

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