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Solidarity with the Enemy: An Egyptian’s Passover message

Maikel Nabil is an Egyptian citizen and blogger who was arrested from his home on March 28th and sentenced on April 10th by a secretive military tribunal to 3 years of imprisonment for the dubious charge of “insulting the army.” This is a grave violation of multiple human rights and a betrayal to the objectives of the Egyptian people’s revolution. This sentence must be overturned regardless of what one thinks of Nabil’s writings or of his politics. Patriotism cannot be invoked to defend injustice.

Nabil is infamous for a number of pronouncements. He is a self-declared “pro-Israel activist,” describes himself as a conscientious objector, and called for ending compulsory military service in Egypt. His blog is peppered with postings which make up in audacity for what they lack in coherence and proper language. On February 4, he uploaded a YouTube video asking his “Israeli friends” to support the Egyptian people’s demand for democracy, because “democracy, human rights, and women rights are basic Israeli values,” vowing that it is “not a revolution of the Muslim Brotherhood.” He promised that Israeli solidarity actions would end the cold peace and usher in a new era of friendship, concluding that “democracies do not fight each other.” Like other Nabil pronouncements, it contained a kernel of truth distorted by his trademark radicalization.

By unjustly imprisoning Maikel Nabil, the Egyptian army megaphoned his simplistic ranting and elevated him from a small-time provocateur to a prisoner of conscience honored by Global Voices and Democracy Now! As a result, I and many others flocked to read his postings for the first time, and his twitter follower count shot up to 1,600. In post-Mubarak Egypt, I like to think that dissent gets treated by reason, not silencing. Maikel Nabil deserves a live TV interview, not a prison cell. In an Aswani-style, exchange, I’d like to see how he’d reconcile his praise of Israel’s democratic values with its reality of systematic ethnic discrimination; his claim of pacifism with Israel’s perpetual militarism; his call for abolishing the one-year mandatory service for non-exempt Egyptian male college graduates, in which their time and dignity are wasted running errands for commanding officers, with Israel’s 2-3 year service for all high-school graduates, male and female, in which their innocence is wasted humiliating and shooting at innocent civilians. The credibility of Maikel Nabil’s grip on reality should end there and then.

As I stand in solidarity with Maikel and feel unthreatened by his incomprehensible worldview, I wish like him that more Israelis had taken a similar stand with the Egyptian revolution and denounced their government’s counter-democratic support of the Mubarak regime. Indeed, a few Israeli activists I know organized small rallies, wrote articles, and one built a website to collect solidarity images from around the world. However, Israeli civil society largely missed the train of the Tahrir phase in the Egyptian revolution. Their opportunity is not totally lost in the rebuilding phase, but it takes more than for-camera actions.

Let me be clear, the only meaningful way in which Israelis can build bridges with post-Mubarak Egypt is one based on invoking justice, not power. This excludes any involvement of the racist Israeli state establishment or its agencies. I cannot tell others what to do, but I can make a few suggestions. Cross-border initiatives may be toxic at the moment when Egypt is predictably paranoid about counter-revolutionary influences. Israeli civil society action has much better chances to flourish by working inside to restore justice and defuse the power imbalance. They may start by pressing the Israeli government to come clean and pay reparations for the murders of Egyptian POWs in the six-day war of 1967, for the subsequent pillaging of Sinai resources, for the bombing of Bahr El-Baqar primary school in 1970; and to accept renegotiation of the 1979 peace treaty which most Egyptians regard as instituting an unfair and undignified power relationship.

A better advice for Israelis is to learn from the Egyptian revolution; how Egyptians -Muslim, Christian, Secular, Feminist, Salafi, Nubian, Sinawi…- came together and proved that the power of the people is stronger than the people in power’s ability to manipulate their fears and play them against one another. All over the region, the Arab peoples are shaking off regimes which for long have benefitted from extending the status quo –whether pro-Western (Mubarak), anti-Western (Assad), unclassifiable (Gaddafi) or anything in between. Even the Palestinians under occupation are mobilizing to unseat their politically bankrupt leadership. Soon enough, Israel may become the only hyphenated democracy among its neighbors. What better time for Israelis –Ashkenazi, Sefardi, Mizrahi, Palestinian, Druze, Bedouin, Russian, Ethiopian…- to take inspiration and reject the race-mongering apparatus which rules them, then extend a blood-free hand to their neighbors in search of a just, humble, and true peace?

Let me also be honest, a just peace with Egypt is only the seed to true friendship. This seed can only bear fruit once Israel has lifted its oppression of and restituted all its non-Jewish natives: citizen, occupied, or exiled.

On Passover, I usually fast to celebrate the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. Wouldn’t it feel right to celebrate one day the deliverance of the Israelis through  Egypt? Since January 25th, millions of Egyptians have taken their fate in their hands and are on the march with it, in search of “dignity, liberty, and social justice.” Take yours, and come meet us down the road. 

Mohammad Talat is an assistant professor of civil engineering at Cairo University and a UC Berkeley alum.

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