The landlady caught me walking up the stairs to my flat yesterday evening. In the semi-darkness, I couldn't tell if she was grinning or grimacing.
“Listen, do yourself a favour and stay in Gaza for now,” she told me grabbing my arm. “It’s the safest place on earth.”
We both burst out laughing at the infectious, typical Gazan black humour, while I picked up the latest incredible headlines from Cairo coming through her television. The Egyptian ruling party’s headquarters were in flames, soldiers were embracing protestors, rich and poor people were in downtown Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and Rafah virulently spewing their guts out.
“For the first time in my life I’m calling my relatives in Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon and Syria to check everything is alright with them, instead of them calling me,” she said.
As the dramatic events unfold in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen - in varying degrees from factional demonstrations to popular revolutions – the story of the Middle East is being completely rewritten.
Ever since Mohammed Bou Azizi set himself alight after dousing himself with petrol in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bou Zid on 17 December, the Arab street has been blazing with the rage and the pride so brutally suppressed for decades. Before Bouazizi, the Egyptians were humiliated once again in their forsaken president’s democratic pantomime called elections. The heroic act of one man and all his followers of the Jasmine Revolution showed all the other Arabs that the unthinkable was possible. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are proving to be the younger generation’s new public sphere where the oppressive force of the regimes is reduced to nothingness. The irony of the Muburak regime’s decision to cut off internet and mobile phone service couldn’t be clearer: It inadvertently invited Egyptians to get off their computers and take to the streets in a bid to understand what was happening.
While Tunisia was the trigger that inflamed the Arab world, the consequences are bound to differ in every country. A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman on Al Arabiya went out of his way to speak of one popular national opposition made of the Egyptian people, without any leader, as opposed to Lebanon’s factional demonstrations. In Cairo and in Tunis, the masses are demanding bread, freedom and dignity – which is completely different from the political chaos reigning in Beirut. Nevertheless, the Egyptians and Tunisians have set their new standard of expectations by speaking truth to power in a snap moment of enlightenment, as events evolved in lightning speed over the last week.
If the Mubarak regime collapses, the dynamics of the Middle East are bound to change radically. Every Arab dictator would be forewarned that his fate is doomed. For the foreign powers that have been flirting with and arming these dictators for the last decades, it will be a rude awakening and a veritable lesson in democracy, in the Arabs’ own language. For Israel, it’s an open Pandora’s box that will inevitably force it back to the foreign policy and security drawing board as the future becomes a big question mark. The first scene of change is already in Rafah, at the border between Gaza and Egypt, where security forces have fled their outposts as Bedouins and protestors went on the rampage. In yet another twist of irony, it is now Hamas security who are somehow guarding the border.
The former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohammed El Baradei, seems to have lost his chance to take the lead and is increasingly seen as an opportunist after retreating back to Vienna following last year’s hype. Who will fill a post-Mubarak leadership vacuum, and how, remains to be seen though there will be little the West could do if the masses keep the momentum to bring the changes they aspire to. It will take days before the big questions are answered and the tear gas subsides, but if the Tunisian revolution is anything to go by, not one Islamist banner has been chanted.
Revolution on paper
Just as the week started, what actually promised to be the real explosive event to shake the Middle East turned out to be little more than a distraction rapidly overtaken by events. Al Jazeera leaked the largest ever archive of secret documents with details of negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. For an entire week, the Qatari network devoted all of its news channels to the Palestine Papers in what is the journalistic scoop of WikiLeaks proportions. Meticulously scripted, produced, and branded, the Palestine Papers was much more than the typical star investigation that exposes people in power for what they are. It was a campaign that left a bitter taste with many ordinary Palestinians wary of Al Jazeera’s bias towards Hamas and Iran. In Gaza, predictably, Hamas rallied the masses in protest against Abbas and his infamous entourage, but in Ramallah the crowds were hailing the president in front of TV cameras.
“The revelations told us nothing new,” was the reaction of dozens of Palestinians I talked to as one embarrassing leak after the other was being broadcast. The belief that the PA is Israel’s best collaborator, manned by a corrupt and power-hungry leadership, is widespread even among the staunchest of Fatah allies. What was really shocking about the leaks were the details that reveal the humiliation and complete sell-out that the Palestinian negotiators were willing to go through, to get nothing in return. If anything, they confirmed definitively that whenever Israel says there is no peace partner in the Middle East, it is effectively talking about itself.
With Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat referring to Jerusalem with its Hebrew name offering Israelis “the biggest Yerushalaiym in history” and Ahmed Qurei drooling over Livny, telling her he would vote for her – there is little else that can be said about them to ruin their reputation forever. But their reputation was never good in the first place, the PA is already in tatters, the peace process has been long thrown out of the window, and while Abbas’s men have the chance to flirt with the occupier, Hamas is not missing an opportunity to emulate the occupation’s torture methods with its political opponents in the Gaza Strip. The Gaza-West Bank divide is now so entrenched that it is pervasive across the board, from civil society to the politicisation of international aid that keeps boycotting the once-democratically elected Islamist movement and arming Abbas’s security forces.
The Palestinian streets will not witness the Arab rage we have seen elsewhere over the weekend, although every Arab is now glued to the screens following the news in an unstoppable adrenalin ruch. Bbut as the past days have shown, it is only a matter of time for things to change beyond expectations. Away from the enraged masses, a tiny group of Gazan youth was busy writing its own explosive manifesto in the last month that is now evolving into a reality of its own on the internet and international media.
“Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!” the manifesto translated into a dozen languages and published by newspapers and magazines around the world states.
“ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart-aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want! We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?”
For now, the Gazan youth group is bound to remain anonymous, but their brothers in Egypt and Tunisia are out on the streets, in broad daylight, broadcast to the world on satellite TV, chanting the very same slogans.
