It's Monday night in Egypt. We are in El-Arish, a resort town about 20 minutes from the Gaza border, where we will go first thing tomorrow morning. I'm with a group of 13 activists and humanitarians mostly from New York, but the hotel is teeming with 45 or so other activists who have answered the call to come to Gaza to try and break the blockade. Most of them are young and sunburned; they have spent the day at the border not getting in. The good news tonight is that a European delegation of 100 people, with a convoy of ambulances and trucks and cars, seems to have gotten through the border after being held up by Egyptian authorities for several days.
We got that rumor at dinner and it has filled our group with confidence. Afterward, we bought bicycle pumps for the dozens of soccer balls we are bringing in, and I grabbed a handful of cosmetics tonight, just because life is not bread alone.
It's an inspiring scene in the hotel. I wonder if Memphis hotels didn't feel like this during the freedom rides. You see college kids walking around in 1948 (Nakba) t-shirts, and Penn State t-shirts too. Some carry guitars to play at the border tomorrow, many of the women wear head scarves. You sense that the issue has finally shed its oriental taboo and taking hold among the young. Four of the groups have been organized by Code Pink, which is frighteningly good at moving bodies and headlines, and that too is an important development, an antiwar group that had long eschewed the issue has come on board. Those years in which "Palestine" was a "complicated" issue even for young lefties has fully come to an end. And this week represents a crucial stage. Nearly 300 westerners will be coming to the Gaza borders demanding to be let in. If they cannot do so they aim to sit there and embarrass the governments that control the Gazans' life.
In Cairo this morning we went to the U.S. Embassy to perform this and that rigmarole to try and get our country's blessing for our trip. Later, after we crossed the monumental bridge over the Suez canal, our bus picked up a police escort as it headed east.
"It just goes to show," said Sammer Aboelela, a 35-year-old Muslim activist from New York, "the claim that Gaza is not occupied is false. They want us to come. We want to come. But it is not up to us or them. It is up to other powers."
I'm a little confused. I am not really a movement person. I like the crowd, but I am here mostly to see and learn and figure stuff out for myself. What I've learned mostly so far is how much the Israel/Palestine issue has set back the whole region. The criticisms of the authoritarian Egyptian government feel true to me. Just as the patent sexism of Egyptian society is obnoxious (in the same way I found the culture too masculine in Syria and Morocco).
While I would never blame everything on Israel, the occupation is like a cancer of colonialism with racist overtones that has affected everything in the neighborhood, including Arab society. The religious zone has been left as the one area in which Palestinians are free to express their resistance, by using something that is uniquely theirs, Islam. Felice Gelman, our group's leader, told a moving story about this effect. A friend of her's in Gaza was rushing out of the house to get something one day when her mother called out to her that she was not covered. The daughter came back into the house angry and said, How can you say that, when there is a photograph of you on the wall on the beach in a bathing suit. Yes but that was in the 1970s, before conditions in the occupied territories had become completely oppressive.
Time to hit the hay. Wish us luck.
