Gaza parties on as Egypt buries its last mummy

Scenes of unfettered jubilation spread like wildfire across the entire Arab world on yeserday night into the day's early hours as millions of Egyptians were told in less than 30 seconds that the tyrant who crushed them for 30 years was out. Forever.


The resilient protestors in Tahrir Square and across the great Egyptian nation proved to themselves, to the Arabs, and to the world, that they could accomplish the unthinkable in a revolution of dignity and newfound, genuine Arab pride.

In unseating the decadent dictator, the Egyptians have restored the confidence needed among the millions of oppressed Arabs living under brutal dictatorships to claim their rights, without any outside intervention, a genuine action for freedom and democracy.

Coming in the wake of the Tunisian president’s downfall, the Egyptian revolution’s slogans are right now being chanted by Arabs all over the Middle East – in celebration of their brothers’ victory but also in the hope of toppling their own disgraced leaders.

In Gaza, Friday night witnessed the biggest street party ever in the city’s main avenue since it was blockaded by Israel and Mubarak’s regime. All kinds of vehicles – from tuktuks smuggled through the tunnels to donkeys and even ambulances – carcaded through the main streets bursting with people from all walks of life and of all ages waving the Egyptian flag to the deafening honking, celebratory gunfire and improvised fireworks.

“I have never felt as happy as today, for our Egyptian brothers, for ourselves, for all the Arabs,” an elderly man driving a battered car and throwing toffee to the people from his window told me before pressing the gas pedal to continue his partying. “Take a nice photo of me. Down with Mubarak, down with the system, down with all of them!”

Rewind by six hours.

Friday afternoon. Cairo is still burning, the tyrant is still on his throne. Friday prayers just finished and it’s just the time in Gaza City when the young people of the blockaded strip are meant to start their own demonstration, pro-democracy, against the political divisions of Fatah and Hamas, for national unity and freedom. Like their brothers in Egypt and Tunisia, the action is advertised on Facebook.


A few lonely youth appear in the Square of the Unknown Soldier, but there are more plainclothes policemen doing the rounds on motorbikes and shady vans, stopping the occasional “revolutionary” and taking them away. A young friend tells me he is on his way – I tell him to take care – but from the looks of it, it’s like every potential demonstrator is waiting for the crowd to appear out of nowhere, just to step in along the way.

Friday afternoon has never looked so busy in the Rimal district, when families are usually eating their generous dishes, including the maqlouba, which literally means upside down. In Egypt, that’s how everything is looking right now, and one can smell the promise in the air, carried with that of the jasmine and the olives, of change about to happen across the entire region.

But it’s not protestors reclaiming the streets that are making Gaza City’s main thoroughfare look busy, it’s the unmarked police cars and motorcycles. On the roof opposite mine, a pair of bearded police are overlooking the boulevard named after the great Libyan rebel leader Omar Al Mukhtar, killed by the Italian colonisers.

All of a sudden, torrential rain. If there was any proof God was on Hamas’s side, this was it. The Islamist movement ruling the coastal enclave was in a tricky situation. It couldn’t but rejoice for their founding movement’s newfound freedom from their nemesis – the Muslim Brotherhood was finally rid of its persecutor, Hasni Mubarak, and this can only be good news. Founded as an offshoot of the Egypt branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1988, Hamas is craving to have such an influential ally next door that could open the gates of Rafah and turn the tide for the impoverished strip, which is now in its fourth year of the Israeli-imposed blockade.

At the same time, it didn’t want Gaza’s younger population, which makes up half of the 1.5 million crammed on this tiny strip the size of Malta, to get any funny ideas about freedom and challenging the regime. It’s already bad enough that there are some rappers and youth organisations spreading their manifestos anonymously on facebook and making headlines in mainstream international media.

“No action, I’m afraid,” my landlady – herself a former student activist in the Left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in its heyday – told me disappointedly. The common entry to our flats – by the way – hosts an enormous red niche with the legendary image of Che Guevara. “In any case what’s Gaza next to Egypt? I’m going back in front of my TV. That bastard is still clinging to his seat.”

Like many others, she had no delusions it would go otherwise over here. The demonstration was doomed before it started because some Fatah wise guy in Ramallah came out publicly encouraging young people to challenge Hamas, doing exactly the opposite of what the smart Egyptian opposition did a few kilometres away. Until today, it is the political and Islamist factions that rule most of civil society in the entire occupied Palestinian territory, but there’s nothing that says it has to remain so.

The current bipolar divide between Fatah and Hamas is entrenched everywhere; so far preventing any effective agent of change like there was in Egypt and Tunisia, a genuinely popular revolt that eradicates the old guard – although in both countries that is going to be a long work in progress.

At the risk of sounding parochial I would say the Maltese can understand the situation perfectly because they live it, in far less dramatic circumstances, in the form of the division between the PN and the MLP, which reduces everything to idiotic simplicity and triviality. That’s why a revolution is not happening in Gaza and the West Bank right now.

But Egypt and Tunisia are a humbling lesson to all the foreign Middle East experts, parachuting journalists and orientalists making a business by gazing at “the Arabs”, none of whom except the exceptional handful could see this happening, not now, not ever. Egypt and Tunisia are proof that the improbable is possible, the unthinkable doable. That even the most brutal, organised and disciplined regimes can be brought down like a collapsing pyramid in a desert of rebellion. Isn’t Egypt, after all, the land of rising Pharaohs falling spectacularly? So spectacularly they were obsessed, in their absolute denial, with preserving their bodies so obsessively, in erecting their pointed phalluses guarded by gigantic sphinxes.

That’s how Mubarak fell, Friday evening. I wrote last Sunday that the longer he clung to power, the more humiliating his downfall would be. A week was already too long; by the end of his last speech on Thursday night, Egyptians from all walks of life were holding their shoes at Mubarak’s image televised in Tahrir Square. On Friday, it took less than 30 seconds for his spy chief who to announce that the fort had given in. Hosni Mubarak is gone. That is it.

No it wasn’t, because that’s when the Gazans took to the streets in childlike glee, a jubilant explosion of young and old on all sorts of vehicles – from donkey-driven carts to tuktuks made in China and smuggled through the tunnels, in a sea of Egyptian and Palestinian flags. My landlady’s 19-year-old son, ordinarily graceful and soft-spoken, was on the balcony brandishing a freaking Kalashnikov, shooting towards the sky (thankfully). From the 15th floor, the street below looked like one long luminous serpent snaking through the dimly lit boulevard – because it has to be said that the electricity was down but the generators were somehow making up for it.

Grabbing my camera, wearing the track suit I ordinarily sleep in, I join the crazy crowd outdoors. An old man with a lovely beard, what must have been his grandson sitting on his lap, drove by in his battered car throwing toffee to the crowd jumping in the middle of the road.

“Isqat isqat ya Mubarak,” he was shouting from the bottom of his entrails with a naughty child’s grin. “Down down with Mubarak.” His grandson looked equally amused.

“The people want the system to fall,” one young guy with the Egyptian flag painted on his cheeks started chanting. “Down down with the system.” Others were playing the drums, gigantic speakers beating on museum-piece vans, megaphones competing in a cacophony of happiness. Pure, genuine, brotherly happiness.

In their midst, Hamas flags, Hamas police, the Al Qassam Brigades and all the militants from the various Gaza factions. Islamic Jihad had a respectable presence, too. Some were shouting “Down down with Abbas,” but a few brave youngsters also had the courage to tell them to shut up and stop being blinded by their partisan pettiness. OWho wants Abbas, or Hamas for that matter, to collapse when the enemy is Israel? Who would benefit from that? Even so, hundreds were chanting “down with the system” – probably for the first time ever not bothering specifying whether they meant “the occupation” or its collaborators.

If everything is possible, this is not the time for cynicism. We have plenty of time for that. Now is the time to smell the orgasmic scent of freedom.

And before taking yet more vertiginous steps in this revolutionary tidal wave, it would be well to remember my landlady’s idol's words of wisdom way back in 1973. It was George Habash, the founder of the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who had said that there can be no liberation of Palestine until there is the liberation of Arab countries from the regimes imposed by the West and Israel. The liberation of Palestine, he said, can only happen through the Arab capitals.

And the Israeli establishment, always mindful of the future and with its Biblical strategy and security machine in full gear 24 hours a day since it was founded in 1948, knows how true Habash’s words are. Only that there is little it can do now as it, together with the entire world, is being over taken by events. At most, it can grieve for its friendly tyrant deposed in the shark-friendly waters of Sharm al-Sheikh. It’s time for Israel to rethink the meaning of “shalom”.

Shukran ya mesr...

Thank you Egypt.

Thank you Bou Azizi.

Thank you all the martyrs of democracy.

Egypt’s revolution shakes the world

Amid all the reigning chaos and unpredictability in Egypt and the region right now, one thing is sure: the Egyptian people’s revolution will bring deep, long-lasting changes not only in the region but in the entire Middle East foreign policy.

Beyond the immediate shockwaves and unpredictable twists to this unfolding story, the Egyptians are effectively doing a favour far beyond their country and region. It vindicates all the individuals, journalists, activists, organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that have been on the frontline of the growing new global civil society speaking truth to power. From Noam Chomsky to Julian Assange to Mohammed Bou Azizi, from Wikileaks to Facebook and Twitter and back to the streets, this is globalisation at its best, where citizenship is also globalised, out of the reach of the cynical expediency of the dominant political world order.

Foreign policy has been overtaken by events, even for the world’s one remaining superpower. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been forced by the Egyptian baker, the unemployed graduate, and the downtrodden mother gathered in Tahrir Square to change their position hour after hour, as Mubarak and his appointed vice-president give in more and more. The popular movement keeps growing, demanding a stop to the diplomatic hypocrisy that has been shaping the Western powers’ foreign policy. People in the streets are speaking truth to power, overthrowing some of the most oppressive dictators who until a couple of weeks ago were dining and dealing with our governments. The taboos are slowly but steadily being lifted. When Obama gave his momentous speech in Cairo, few believed he would have to back up his words two years later as the very Egyptian dictator who hosted him was being overthrown.

Western power have not only flirted with Mubarak and his ilk – they pushed him to endorse the so-called war on terror, giving him the “legitimate” platform to crush all opposition through torture, summary executions and forced transfer of totally innocent people to American prisons – Guantanamo being the most notorious. These are the same European and American terror laws, by the way, that are still punishing 1.5 million Palestinians trapped living under the Gaza blockade under the pretext of isolating Hamas. All of this was done under the simplistic notion that it’s better to have a secure dictatorship than an Islamist government – as if radical Islamism was the only alternative, besides ignoring how much radical Islam is fuelled by the West’s foreign policy in the first place.

The stubborn dictator refuses to get out of his ivory tower, but the more he stays, the more concessions he will have to make and the more powerless he becomes, risking getting out of the presidential palace in the form of a ghost. One can expect the fear-mongering American right-wing to spring on the opportunity to highlight its apocalyptic claims of Egypt falling under the vilified Muslim Brotherhood, but that would be turning cause and effect upside down – besides being a lie, given that the Islamist movement has long renounced violence and wants to pass Islamic laws only through the democratic process. The longer the stubborn dictator clinches to his seat of power, the more he destabilises the region.

And the region is feeling the immediate shockwaves – every Arab dictator is now shitting in his pants. Israel, which claims it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, has been frantically calling on the West to defend the ageing tyrant. It has good reason to fear, as its most powerful and friendliest neighbour is being toppled by his people. Mubarak’s peace agreement with Israel is also in the balance – not because Egypt would attack it but because it does not represent the Egyptians’ opinions towards the occupier of Palestine. Once again, anger and frustrations buried for decades are bound to come out in an explosive way unless Mubarak steps down immediately.

The damage to Egypt’s economy grows day by day, but even in this case, it is only Mubarak who is responsible. In just one week, he brought Egypt’s exports down by 6, the tourism industry to a complete halt. The longer he stays, the worse it will get.

The ongoing crisis in Egypt is leaving its toll on the Gaza Strip as the Rafah border crossing – the only one through which Gazans are allowed to travel – has been closed indefinitely. The border witnessed fierce battles when Bedouins in the Sinai attacked the terminal, with border police fleeing the scene, leaving thousands of Gazans stranded in Egypt and abroad. Increased numbers of Gaza government border guards were posted along the Philadelphi Corridor following the Egyptians’ desertion. In a switch of sorts, Gaza border police are now feeding the few hungry Egyptian border guards that remain, sending food through the tunnels.

Tunnel trade – 80% of goods in Gaza are delivered through the dangerous tunnels due to the blockade – is also suffering as transport in Egypt has been largely stalled. This has led to price increases that were quickly felt on the Gaza market, particularly the price of cement, steel and fuel – all of which are banned by Israel from entering the Gaza Strip and are therefore smuggled through the tunnels. Gaza government police were seen checking petrol stations to make sure that owners were not taking advantage of the situation by raising prices after rumors of fuel shortages and hoarding spread throughout the coastal enclave. Eight out of a total of 12 major fuel transfer pipelines under the Gaza-Egypt border were reported to have shut down as the expected consignments of fuel failed to reach the tunnels.

The Gaza power plant – which has shifted all of its fuel procurement from Israel to Egypt over the last three weeks – is estimated to have enough fuel in store for another two to four weeks. But aid agencies are concerned that a protracted crisis in Egypt could lead to a severe impact on the blockaded enclave, affecting hospitals, homes that rely on fuel to run generators, and water and sanitation infrastructure, above and beyond the daily power cuts which Gazans already experience.

For some Gazans who have seen democratically elected Hamas being punished and boycotted by the West, which is an accomplice in the closure of Gaza, the prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood being in a future Egyptian government reminds them of the double standards in the dominant foreign policy.

“Look at what happened to us,” a concerned colleague told me as she went through all the hardships the Palestinians were forced to endure after Western powers decided that their democratic decision was wrong.

The truth is Egypt is not Gaza. Nobody can boycott or blockade this Arab reference point of 80 million people – at most it can be turned into another Iran, but nobody except Iran has an interest in that happening, not even the protestors in Tahrir Square. And the longer Mubarak stays, it is not only him who will be forced to give more concessions and come out of this more humiliated, but his entire entourage of strange bedfellows.