We Tried to March on Gaza From Egypt to to Break the Blockade

As Greta Thunberg plans her second attempt to reach Gaza, genocide through forced starvation  continues there. Thunberg will take part in the Global Sumud Flotilla departing from Spain on August 31st. This time, dozens of boats will sail via Tunis in an attempt to break the blockade that Israel has imposed on the Strip since 2007. The calculated nature of this orchestrated famine makes it unlike any other in the world. In June, Thunberg had already taken part in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition that was intercepted by the Israeli Occupying Force. Alongside the other members of her crew, she was detained, questioned, and deported.

At the same time that the flotilla was challenging the sea blockade, hundreds of activists flew to Egypt to walk to Gaza across the Sinai peninsula. The Global March on Gaza was an international effort bolstered by a motorised convoy from Algeria and Tunisia. These activists were rumored to have received free gas as they drove across Libya before being stopped at the Egyptian border.

I flew from Barcelona to Cairo via Milan to join the sizable Swiss delegation taking part in the march. On the plane, I spotted other unmistakable activists linking up with the Spanish delegation. The Egyptian authorities were said to be turning participants away at the border so we kept our distance from each other and maintained that we were coming to see the Pyramids.

An Egyptian NGO had organised buses to ferry marchers from Cairo to el-Arish in the Sinai. From there, the plan was to walk two days to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to increase pressure on the Israelis to open the border and let in thousands of tons of aid that are currently blockaded on the Egyptian side. There was never any pretence that we would try to walk into Gaza, but the hope was that combined efforts by participants from five continents would contribute to forcing our own governments to confront Israel’s genocidal policy.

I had not been to Egypt since 2007 – before Tahrir Square, the fall of Mubarak, Morsi’s election, and el-Sisi’s coup and consolidation. Surprisingly, much of Downtown felt familiar when I arrived without being delayed at passport control. (The FT reports that the rich have started to return to a neighbourhood where rents were slashed under Nasser.)

I was staying in a hostel directly overlooking Tahrir Square. I had decided to avoid the hotels recommended for our coordinators. This decision proved fortuitous as the Spanish delegation was raided by the Egyptian police and sent back to the Iberian peninsula. When we signed up to participate in the march, the organisers had informed us that the protest would be rubber stamped by the Egyptian government and that everything we did was legal.

I had reasoned that, despite its deference to the US and crackdown on all forms of political opposition, el-Sisi’s regime was at least nominally pro-Palestinian. In May, a previous protest had taken place in el-Arish and participants included 11 members of the Italian parliament and three members of the European Parliament.

My naiveté became apparent as activists with Arab surnames traveling to Cairo on European passports were turned away at the airport, and the organisers advised us not to congregate in Downtown Cairo and to avoid walking around with backpacks that might indicate we were joining in the march.

The Swiss delegation was working with a team of Egyptian lawyers to whom we gave power of attorney. When we contacted the embassy to inform them of our plan, they politely recommended that we go home.

The streets of Downtown were constantly patrolled, and the organisers had still not received approval for the march by June 13th – the morning on which we were meant to depart. The buses out of Cairo were off the table. We were all supposed to take taxis in pairs to Ismailia on the Suez Canal where the buses would pick us up.

Friday, June 13th was the first day of Israel’s strikes on Tehran. I buddied up with an American who had spent the month of January in the West Bank trying to prevent continued settler violence. Without incident we got out of Cairo and onto the single highway linking the capital to the Sinai peninsula. At the first checkpoint, the police took anyone aside who had a foreign passport. There were hundreds of us. The Egyptian government had banned the march. They made us wait by the side of the highway all afternoon.

Guarded by teenagers with automatic weapons, we hid from the baking desert sun behind a rest stop. The Sahara stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. Keffiyehs came out of packpacks. The Turkish delegation led us in songs about internationalist solidarity. Activists posted videos urging those back home to call their embassies and pressure the Egyptians into letting us march. The Irish fainted in the 39°C heat.

As the hours passed, we tried to develop a collective strategy, but this move was impeded by the lack of organisation within each delegation. Before flying to Egypt, we had been asked to sign a pledge committing to non-violence, but beyond that, the march was politically heterogeneous. The sanctity of individual choice prevailed over the safety that comes with collective agency. Given the time constraints inherent in organising an international protest of this kind, there was no way we could develop the structures required for some kind of sociocracy. The allergy to hierarchy common in the European Left meant that we were bereft of any mechanism for making fast, democratic decisions. I felt that the lessons from Occupy and Tahrir Square had not been learned. As a European – ignorant of the local context, unused to political work outside the global North, unable to speak Arabic – I would have been happy following instructions that day. No sane organisation would give me the same amount of power as local organisers. Yet there we were, beholden to the whims of the least experienced in the group who would feel no obligation to follow what we decided regardless. We struggled to make a group decision: how should we react if the police decide to clear our little encampment? Should we attempt to link up with the rest of the march that was kettled one checkpoint further along the highway?

At 7 p.m., the police brought a convoy of buses to take us all away. Some people refused to board, and they were taken aside and put on a different bus. We panicked, thinking they would be detained indefinitely, but these activists were taken straight to the airport and deported. Given Egypt’s reliance on tourism – our lawyers later told us – the regime was reluctant to be seen putting visitors on tourist visas in detention. I felt that many activists behaved as if they were at a sit-in in some European city, rather than facing Egyptians not wearing any insignia or uniform. Were they police? Military? Men in polo shirts walked around with stacks of fifty passports stuffed into back pockets. The violence at the other checkpoint was far greater: videos of activists beaten and whipped began circulating online.

After two hours spent getting passports back to each of us, the convoy of buses headed for Cairo. As we turned off the highway, I assumed we were all being taken to the airport, but it seemed that the regime did not have the energy to organise flights for us all. Instead, we were dumped by the side of a motorway south of the city. We piled into cabs and headed downtown.

Over the next few days, as the Israelis tried to persuade the United States to bomb Tehran, it became clear that no second attempt at a march was coming. I ended up making a surreal trip to see the Pyramids – experiencing the common dissociation that comes when reintegrating mainstream society after political action.

In some ways, the aborted Global March on Gaza was like most political work: time-consuming, exhausting, frustrating. Nonetheless, I’m glad I went and tried to leverage what collective power we have right now in a situation that requires fighting for the least worst outcome. I felt inspired to be around people who had come from all over the world to be a part of that fight.

I hope that those in Gaza and the West Bank saw what we were trying to do and that it means something to them (even if you cannot eat solidarity). Hope is a practice – it dies if you do not maintain it.

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The post We Tried to March on Gaza From Egypt to to Break the Blockade appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Charles Stevenson.