Free Alaa Abd el-Fattah from Egyptian prison: symbol of the 2011 youth revolution, he has been on a hunger strike for 200 days.

COP27 climate change conference: The struggle against climate change cannot be separated from the struggle for human rights.

Protest vigil at the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv | Thursday November 10, 5:00 p.m

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COP27, the global climate summit, opened on November 6 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where Egyptian President el-Sisi is hosting over 100 heads of state. While world leaders are coming to Egypt to discuss the planet’s future, tens of thousands of political activists are languishing in Egyptian prisons.

The most prominent of them, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, expanded his hunger strike on COP27’s opening day and is now also refraining from water. There is a danger that within a few days this will lead to his death, since for more than 200 days he has been on a partial hunger strike (consuming only 100 calories a day), which has greatly weakened his body.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah was one of the most prominent activists in the 2011 Arab Spring. Since then he has been imprisoned repeatedly, continuing his activism in the intervals and publishing a book of articles in English. In 2019 he was released after serving five years for participating in a non-violent demonstration in Cairo. Within a few months he was again arrested and tried a second time in a military court, this time together with his lawyer, Muhammad Albaker, and activist Mohamed (Oxygen) Ibrahim. Alaa was sentenced to 5 years in prison and his two friends to 4 years. The charge: publishing false information on the Internet.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah has British as well as Egyptian citizenship. Despite this, Wadi Natrun prison authorities prevent him from receiving a visit from British Embassy representatives. In addition, and contrary to Egyptian law, the authorities deny him access to newspapers, books and radio.

A large-scale international public campaign has been going on for the past few months, in parallel to the hunger strike started by Alaa in April. Alaa’s mother and sisters, who are also central activists in Egypt’s democratic movement, are leading the call to release him from prison. Pressure is also being directed at the British government.

Public pressure has intensified ahead of the climate summit. Prominent personalities, including dozens of Nobel laureates for literature and science, as well as environmental and human rights organizations, called on the Egyptian regime to release Alaa and his friends ahead of the conference. These calls emphasize the fact that the struggles against climate change and for human rights cannot be separated, and that it is unfitting for the climate conference to be held on Egyptian soil while the country’s authorities are brutalizing a freedom fighter like Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

Khalid Abdalla, an Egyptian-British film actor who is active in the campaign to free Alaa, explained in an interview with the Sky News on November 5: “We are very concerned about the future of the earth and humanity in light of the climate crisis, but if all the heads of state cannot guarantee justice for Alaa Abd el-Fattah and the Egyptian prisoners of conscience, how will they manage to save  humanity?”

For more details and media interviews, contact Yoav Gal Tamir, spokesperson of the Daam Party: +972-50-7859475

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After more than 100 days of hunger strike in Egyptian prison, Alaa Abd al-Fattah is determined to continue struggling until his rights, and those of tens of thousands of political prisoners falsely imprisoned by al-Sisi’s regime, are recognized.  Israel maintains close cooperation with the dictatorial regime in Cairo, ignoring its shocking human rights record. Lapid and Bennett, like Netanyahu, are interested in cooperating with al-Sisi so that he will help them control the region and silence the Palestinians.

On Sunday, July 10, the new Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, had a phone conversation with Egyptian President Abd al Fattah al-Sisi. According to the report, the conversation dealt with the expected visit of US President Biden to the area, the Palestinian issue, and an investigation into the unknown fate of dozens of Egyptian commandos buried in Latrun in 1948.

Not on the agenda was the condition of Alaa Abd al-Fattah in Wadi a-Natrun prison, although the leaders were conversing on the 99th day of his hunger strike. The fate of Egypt’s prisoners of conscience is not an issue that interests anyone in the Israeli political system. In the eyes of the Israeli public, including the circles of Labor and Meretz, the Arab world is divided into lovers and haters of Israel. Accordingly, al-Sisi is considered a positive factor with whom one should maintain good relations. What dictators do at home vis-à-vis their political opponents, many of whom have no connection to terrorist and violent activity, is a matter of indifference here.

Although al-Sisi’s regime now appears to be stable, it is Alaa Abd al-Fattah and his comrades who represent the future of Egypt and indeed, the future of the entire region.

Alaa (41) is a leader of the young revolutionaries, a symbol of the generation that led the January 2011 revolution. Since then he has been in and out of prison for a decade. In 2013 he was arrested by the military government and imprisoned for 5 years for participating in an illegal demonstration. After being released in early 2019, he remained in his home for several months, until he was imprisoned again and sentenced to an additional five years on a fabricated charge of “spreading false information.”

For years he was held in the notorious Tora Prison south of Cairo, where he was denied access to books and newspapers. Contrary to Egyptian law and human rights conventions, the authorities also deny him the possibility to leave his cell for walking and sports, and visits of one person were allowed only every few weeks. Although he holds both British and Egyptian citizenship, Egyptian authorities prevent British embassy representatives from visiting him.

In response Alaa decided to commence an open hunger strike, demanding improved conditions.  The strike is carried out according to the method of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, and includes consumption of 100 calories per day (the average daily consumption of an adult in a state of inactivity is 2,400 calories). Begun in early April this year, it has been going on for more than 100 days.

About a month after the start of the strike, because of public pressure from within Egypt and the international arena, Alaa was transferred out of Tora Prison to Wadi a-Natrun Prison northwest of Cairo. Here the conditions are slightly improved. For example, he was allowed a mattress after being forced to sleep on exposed concrete for years. Yet Egyptian authorities still refuse his main demands, and do not allow him to receive visits from family, lawyers, or members of the British embassy.

Alaa Abd al-Fattah belongs to a revolutionary family. His sister Sanaa was imprisoned for 18 months and only recently released. His mother, Dr. Laila Soueif , is a lecturer in chemistry at Cairo University. She has accompanied him for ten years, visiting him regularly and speaking bravely for the freedom of the Egyptian people. His father, the lawyer Ahmad Saif al-Islam Abd al-Fattah died in 2014, while Alaa was in prison. During the Mubarak regime he was known as a leading jurist and human rights fighter; in 1999 he cofounded the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a human rights group which he headed for years.

In 2021 Alaa published a book of articles in English entitled You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, in which he reviews years of struggle by the youth of Egypt’s Al-Shabab revolution.

Egyptian prisons – Torture and neglect resulted in the deaths of many

The call for the release of Alaa Abd al-Fattah has become a banner of the struggle against the al-Sisi, who is estimated to hold some 60,000 people in his prisons because of their views.

In anticipation of Biden’s visit to the Middle East and his meeting with al-Sisi in Saudi Arabia, the New York Times published a comprehensive investigation into arbitrary arrests in Egypt. The article was published on July 16 under the headline “Egypt’s Revolving Jailhouse Door: One Pretrial Detention After Another.”

This is a comprehensive investigation that relies on the testimonies of volunteer lawyers who come daily to the courts in Cairo and elsewhere to locate detainees whose families have lost contact with them. These lawyers, together with the family members, prepare endless lists of detainees about whom the Egyptian authorities withhold information.

The investigation shows a Kafkaesque reality of pre-trial detention that lasts two years, after which new charges are often filed against the detainee. According to the report, the despair and difficult conditions have caused the deaths of hundreds of detainees since al-Sisi came to power.

Amnesty International also recently published a report on the extent of human rights violations in Egypt under the heading Egypt: Flawed investigation into death in custody missed opportunity for justice. The report focuses on the deaths of inmates held without trial (at least 52 deaths in 2021), citing credible reports that their deaths resulted from torture, abuse and denial of health services.

Torture and abuse are used especially during the interrogation phase and the first period of detention, as part of an attempt to extract confessions and punish dissidents. Human Rights Watch, as well as a public inquiry conducted by UN Committee Against Torture, found in separate investigations that torture in Egypt is systematic and widespread.

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Hurricane Irma, rapidly approaching the coast of Florida, is a meteorological phenomenon. But its political implications are equally far-reaching.

At this writing (September 8, 2017), the world is watching with horror as Irma, with winds of up to 175 miles an hour, continues to tear through the Caribbean. Television plays smart-phone recordings that compare the force of the wind to the power of a jet plane taking off. Forecasters explain that wind is not the main problem, rather water. Cities are flooded while infrastructure, homes, and everything on Irma’s path are destroyed, as we saw with Katrina in 2005 and Harvey recently in Texas. Irma is the most powerful hurricane in recorded history, and it won’t be the last. Two others are making their way through the Gulf of Mexico. It is in transition seasons, when the ocean temperature reaches 26 degrees centigrade, that conditions are created allowing for hurricanes of unprecedented intensity.

So what’s the connection between this and politics? Hurricane Katrina was a negative turning point for the presidency of George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump is facing a similar challenge. He’s so concerned about possible blowback that he sided with the “loathsome” Democratic congressional leaders to deliver an urgent aid package for repairing the destruction that Harvey left in Houston. Indeed, just a few months ago, Trump announced his withdrawal from the Paris agreement which President Obama had said was a “turning point for our planet.” The agreement aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and extreme phenomena such as these storms.

As is generally known, Trump is a climate change denier, saying that data on global warming is bogus. Moreover, he has mobilized the “working class” with claims that climate change is a “Chinese hoax” – a conspiracy against them in the name of the environment. In fact, Trump is indeed a friend of oil companies and high-polluting heavy industry. In the name of the American worker, he has repealed regulations intended to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Ironically, Hurricane Irma slammed into Trump’s estate on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, valued at $18 million.

You can fool most of the people most of the time by using the word “fake” to dismiss scientific knowledge. But you cannot fool the wind. There are even those who have discovered that you can harness the wind instead of fighting it, and this is happening in Scandinavia. The Swedes and Danes believe in science. They are taking action to wean themselves from oil by 2050. For this purpose, they are setting up giant wind turbine farms off the coast of the North Sea. It turns out that renewable energy is not simply a way to save the planet from global warming, but an efficient and inexpensive way to generate energy. The technology of renewable energy is in lockstep with the tremendous progress in the development of the electric motor and the autonomous vehicle, which will replace air-polluting private cars in the foreseeable future.

In the German city of Stuttgart, home to Mercedes and Porsche, a court has ruled to prohibit the use of polluting diesel engines. Angela Merkel tried to reassure the owners of Germany’s approximately 15 million diesel cars by promising to do “everything in our powers to make sure there won’t be such bans.” Supported by Daimler Benz, she is trying to delay the inevitable. Europe as a whole (including the United Kingdom) is moving away from fuel-powered cars toward electric cars.

Although the USA lies beyond the ocean, and the warm Middle Eastern temperament is a far cry from the Scandinavian persona, the north wind has a direct connection to the winds blowing in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. The Swedish decision to be the world’s first oil-free economy is a real threat to the Saudi kingdom, where oil prices are falling. Oil producing countries, from Putin’s Russia to Maduro’s Venezuela, are approaching a deep economic crisis that threatens their rule.

The Saudi kingdom looks around and realizes that change must come sooner or later, and therefore it is taking hesitant steps to revamp its economic structure, which is built on oil, oil, and more oil. So far, oil has allowed Saudi citizens to laze about, not pay taxes, and live on state subsidies that buy social tranquility. However, Prince Mohammed, the son of the elderly King Salman, is now the young heir to the throne. He began a series of reforms called “Vision 2030,” the first and foremost of which aims to privatize the Aramco oil company.

Trump’s election initially brought a flush of joy to Saudi cheeks, but the destructive power of Hurricane Irma is a harbinger that oil’s time is over. Twenty-five years late, the Saudis realize that they must privatize the economy in order to save the regime: airports, transportation, water, schools, everything is up for grabs, but there are no buyers. Privatization requires modernization. And how does modernization jibe with sharia law, with a ban on women working, with millions of foreign workers and servants lacking rights and citizenship? If Saudi Arabia wants to privatize, it will have to shake loose its reactionary regime. If and when that happens, don’t be surprised to find the Arab Spring knocking on the Saudi door.

The wind and the (Arab) Spring are the sworn enemies of the oil industry and the reactionary Saudi regime, which has become bogged down in feverish efforts to prevent the Spring from spreading throughout the Arab region. This is the basis of the conflict with neighboring Qatar, which has long understood that the wind and the Spring cannot be stopped, and the best-case scenario is to contain them both. Thus, the Qataris are buying up whatever they can, from abstract art, soccer clubs, banks, and real estate to a political party in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi enemies – Hamas, Sheikh Raed Salah in Israel, and even Azmi Bishara are in Qatar’s pocket. Meanwhile, to protect outdated regimes, Saudi Arabia does all it can to prop up al-Sisi in Egypt and friendly regimes in Libya and Yemen, trying to push Iran out of Syria and Iraq. But both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are out of step with the times.

It transpires that the same wind that supplies renewable energy in distant Scandinavia is breathing down the neck of out-of-date Arab regimes and revitalizing young forces seeking democracy and progress. Arab intellectuals, who rose up against the old and corrupt regimes in 2011, were the result of a global technological revolution that connected them through social media with likeminded youngsters in European capitals. Both groups are fed up with neoliberalism, which uses science to deprive the young of their future, helping the 1% to control half the world’s wealth.

Saudi money backed Egyptian youngsters to form the “Tamarud” movement, which overthrew the democratically elected Mohammad Mursi, and to support the military coup of General Sisi. Saudi money also bought jihadist militias who wiped out the Syrian revolutionaries. This has had a devastating effect. The world is rapidly changing and Information can’t be blocked. Technology is altering the world order. The desperate attempt by the Arab regimes, especially the Gulf kingdoms, to forestall social change will not work.

It seems that, like the diesel engine, the “Sunni axis” is also becoming obsolete. The crisis between Qatar and Saudi Arabia reflects the depth of the crisis. The Gulf States are imploding. Israel is a high-tech superpower, but in the political sphere, it is doing its best to buy time and cling to the old world order. The view is that we should ally ourselves with the “moderate Sunni axis” instead of ending the Occupation and giving millions of Palestinians a future of hope in a modern and democratic state.

The Sunni axis creates the illusion that the status quo is possible, and our situation could never be better with Trump, while the Saudi king promises that there will be no pressure to reach a solution with the Palestinians. But this will not stop global warming – or the changes happening around us and in the wider world. Not only is the earth warming up, with Trump footing the bill for the victims, but the Middle East too is changing. The winds of the Arab Spring that blew in the summer of 2011 might have died down, but they will return.

The absurdity of the situation in Washington, and the shameful spectacle in Jerusalem of senior officials close to the prime minister being marched to interrogation rooms, prove that the old regimes and old technologies are on their way out. Change is inevitable. The bloody Occupation will also pass. Israelis and Palestinians will need to find a way to merge into the modern world, if they do not want to be knocked down by the wind.

* Translated from the Hebrew by Robert Goldman

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Since Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon’s last visit to Washington, tension between Israel and the White House has only increased. The State Department and the White House refused to have anything to do with Yaalon, who once accused Secretary of State John Kerry of having a “messianic fervor,” and he was left talking shop with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. For the others, he has become a persona non grata. This boycott of the Israeli defense minister caught most of the headlines, but the important interview Yaalon gave to the Washington Post, appearing on the paper’s website on October 24, was mostly ignored. This interview reveals that the Israeli government has buried Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to the two-state idea.

In the interview, Yaalon was explicitly asked if he believed in the two-state solution. His reply was military in its brevity: “You can call it the new Palestinian empire. We don’t want to govern them, but it is not going to be a regular state for many reasons.” When the interviewer asked what he meant by a Palestinian empire, Yaalon replied: “Autonomy. It is going to be demilitarized.” There are two reasons for this, according to Yaalon. Firstly, any territory vacated by Israel will be taken over by Hamas. Secondly, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is no partner for peace because he refuses to recognize the Jewish character of the State of Israel. Thus Yaalon takes us back 30 years to when Israel, under Menachem Begin’s leadership, held negotiations with Anwar Sadat’s Egypt over the establishment of Palestinian autonomy – without Palestinian participation.

Netanyahu’s vision

In his recent Knesset speech, Netanyahu substantiated Yaalon’s words. It turns out he is not in despair at all about the political dead-end; on the contrary, he is grasping the changes in the Arab world hungrily, and is greatly encouraged by the new regime in Egypt, which resembles Sadat’s regime: “Because there is hope, change is taking place, slowly but clearly, important change in the central states of the Arab world, who see eye to eye with Israel on many of the challenges we face. They understand that the greatest dangers for them and for us come from radical Islam. Together with them, we will continue to explore possibilities for advancing regional solutions, which can help solve our conflict with the Palestinians. It has always been said that an arrangement with the Palestinians would improve our relations with the Arab world, and there is something in that. But there is also another truth – an arrangement with the Arab world can help us settle our relations with the Palestinians. A regional settlement would benefit everyone.”

According to Netanyahu’s understanding of reality following the Arab Spring, Israel has enemies in common with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan: the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. The Brotherhood is the main enemy of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, while Shiite Iran aspires to regional hegemony at the expense of the Sunni states. In Netanyahu’s view, these are positive developments which may enable him to reach a regional settlement while skirting the Palestinian issue. Later, he will impose autonomy on them, as Sadat did.

Netanyahu’s understanding of reality is in direct opposition to that of Europe and the US, who see recent developments in the region as no less than a disaster. From their point of view, Saudi Arabia is trying to prevent democratic change in the region, as expressed in the Arab Spring, and was behind the military coup in Egypt and the murderous suppression of the Egyptian opposition. Media in the US publish information almost daily about serious human rights violations in Egypt and continuously condemn Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime, which has become Israel’s “strategic” ally. In the opinion of the West, the situation in Egypt suggests that Sisi’s fate will be no different from Sadat’s, and that he is leading the country to national and economic disaster.

From the Oslo Accords to autonomy

Netanyahu’s path has no international support because it relies on regimes which are waging a rearguard battle against the democratic forces of change. For this reason it is untenable. There is not a single state in the region or in the world willing to support the Netanyahu-Yaalon vision, because it means the death of the Oslo Accords and all that this entails. Oslo was a response to the Begin-Sadat autonomy plan, and it gave a partial but insufficient answer to the demands of the Palestinians during the first Intifada. Oslo was an interim solution which was to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, but Israel had no intention of fulfilling its side of the deal by reaching a permanent settlement: it has never indicated what the permanent borders of the future state would be, because the government was not prepared to confront the settlers, and it left other critical issues unsolved such as the fate of Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords also determined the economic mechanisms that enabled the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which relies almost entirely on foreign aid. The US and Europe funded the wages of the police and civil service as well as economic development projects and infrastructure. But they did this only as long as they believed the aim was to pave the way towards a Palestinian state, and not to shore up autonomy under Israeli occupation. This arrangement was very convenient for Israel: the US trained Palestinian police officers who acted in “security coordination” with Israel, while the Israeli governments strengthened their hold on the West Bank undisturbed, through massive construction in the settlements. However, Netanyahu decided that his political survival was more important than anything else, and he’s killing the goose that laid the golden egg. By casting Abu Mazen in the mold of enemy of the Jewish people and supporter of terror, he has also cast doubt on the continued existence of the PA and of security coordination with Israel.

Now Netanyahu and Yaalon are aiming to go even further. Making the PA an “empire which means autonomy” – the mountain that gave birth to a mouse – puts an end to the idea of a Palestinian state and to the PA itself. So far, there has been no Palestinian leader willing to head an autonomous entity in the shadow of occupation. The separation barrier, separate buses for Jews and Palestinians, land expropriation, magnetic cards, limitations on freedom of movement and arbitrary arrests create a reality which no Palestinian leader can accept. Yaalon is fooling himself and all Israelis, since there is no way of compelling Palestinians to accept autonomy while not continuing to rule over them. Israel has been controlling the Palestinians for almost 50 years, from determining their ID numbers to controlling the water they drink and the electricity they use. The false reality it created through the PA is coming to an end.

In despair, Abu Mazen does all he can to escape Israel’s grasp by what are generally called “unilateral steps,” crawling towards the UN where he will meet the US administration, which will send him away empty-handed as usual. It will refuse to recognize a Palestinian state and refuse to compel Israel to leave the West Bank. The frustrated Americans have no option but to grit their teeth, curse Netanyahu, call him a spineless coward, and… veto Palestinian demands. The strategic alliance between Israel and the US has so far only perpetuated the conflict, and it is now bringing Abu Mazen’s political demise ever closer, together with that of the PA itself. Bankrolling states are warning that if this should happen, they will cease funding the PA. The bill for the occupation will have to be paid by Israeli citizens, who even now find it hard to make ends meet. It is true that Netanyahu benefits from the fact that he has no opposition within Israel, but he faces increasing international criticism as well as millions of Palestinians who are not willing to dance to his tune.

Translated by Yonatan Preminger

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Roni Ben Efrat (left) in Messina

A lecture by Roni Ben Efrat in SABIRMaydan, in Messina, September 28th.

Topic: The difference is between those who have rights and those who don’t: United against the system of inequalities, is there any chance to win?

Part 1: The difference is between those who have rights and those who don’t: United against the system of inequalities…

In the summer of 2011 in a series of mass demonstrations, over a million people marched in the streets of Tel Aviv. Thousands of youngsters camped on Rothschild Boulevard occupying “the” city center for three months.

Although Israel is often painted as a monolithic fortress of sweeping national consensus, that summer a new face of Israel appeared on the scene demanding “social justice”. This slogan was no doubt been influenced by the squares of Madrid and Egypt, demanding: “Eish, Hurrira, Adala Ijtima’ia!” (Bread, Freedom and Social Justice!). Yet, a fundamental difference exists between the squares of Egypt and Tel Aviv:  while the Egyptian and Tunisian youngsters called for “Isqat al Nizam” (down with the regime), the Israeli leaders of the social movement demanded that the Israeli government – right wing as it was – should bend to their demands. Their logic was: we elected you and you have to “work” for us! (instead of working for the tycoons).

The background for the huge protest movement was the major inequalities which developed in Israel in the past 25 years, as a result of its economy turning from a welfare economy, with collective responsibility (at least to its Jewish citizens) to an extreme privatized enterprise, geared to benefit a tiny elite of tycoons. This process affected of course the low classes, who reached pauperization, but affected the middle classes too, who saw themselves pushed down the social ladder with no prospects for affordable housing, or job security, now or in old age.

Yet, two issues were absent from the movement: 1. The question of inequality and poverty of the Arab citizens of Israel (over 53% are below the poverty line). 2. The question of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the Israeli context, a social movement that does not integrate these two questions will be very limited politically. It sends a clear message to the regime that it does not intend to go all the way to change it. This is in stark contrast to Egypt and Tunisia where the revolutionary forces succeeded in toppling the regimes and opening a new page in the history of the Middle East – for good or for bad. All the upheavals we are witnessing today, in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, are a result of that “big bang” of the Arab spring.

The rationalization of the young protest leaders for NOT putting upfront the issue of the occupation, not adopting the slogan “One Justice for All”, not calling Bibi to “Go Home”,  was that this direction might divide the movement. They said that Social Justice is not divided into “Right” and “Left” – everyone is suffering – and that the political debate should be pushed aside. This position was being advocated by the Labor party behind the scenes, but was adopted by all the leadership, even the more leftist parts.

The movement had a deep impact on the Israeli discourse and psyche. It was an incredible learning process. A deep distrust of the “elite” and the “power” has been scorched into the consciousness of people and is apparent until today in numerous ways. But, the avoidance of challenging the ruling power resulted in a diverted course. The elections that followed that protest in 2013 resulted in the most right wing government ever. Because the movement failed to make the connection between Social Justice and the Occupation, the extreme right-wing settler party “The Jewish Home” headed by Naftali Bennet (12 seats) could adopt the protest discourse and tag it on to its anti-Arab, and pro-settlement agenda. The protest discourse was also hijacked by Yair Lapid, of the “Yesh Atid” party, representing the politically conservative middle classes (19 seats).  The Labor party, which adopted the agenda of social justice with no political agenda, won only 15 seats. Some of the leaders of the Protest movement joined Labor and became members of Knesset. Except for very small social gains, mainly free kindergarten from age 3, the basic demands have been ignored: poverty, insecurity, and lack of housing remain prevalent.

The collapse of the peace talks, and the third war on Gaza, clearly showed that Bibi Netanyahu’s right wing agenda has to be tackled socially and politically.

Part 2: …is there any chance to win?

If the Protest movement enjoyed an over 85% consensus among Jewish Israelis the July war on Gaza, too, enjoyed an overwhelming consensus, including those parties who are supposedly for the peace process.  It was as if Israelis ignored the fact that Netanyahu had de facto killed the talks with Abu Mazen and created a deep political vacuum. It was as if all the wise pundits forgot that they themselves had forecast a new round of violence as a result of the void in the political venue.

We can conclude the discussion after the war between Right and Left in Israel like this: The Right says that the war proved that Israel has to continue the blockade on Gaza, hence also prevent the West Bank from falling] into the hands of Hamas or even more extreme forces. That’s not new of course. The new part is in the argumentation of the Left: Labor and Merez say that after the war “a window of opportunity” has opened (partly as reaction to the Arab spring) which includes Sisi and his generals in Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Abu Mazen. So, the same Left that talked about social justice and was reluctant to stand up to the Right wing and to racism, today welcomes all those forces of darkness, which are trying to defeat the forces of democracy in their own countries.

Today the Arab world is divided between two reactionary forces: Saudia Arabia, supporting Sisi, and other Salafist radical forces in Syria and Iraq, while the Qataris support the Moslem Brotherhood and Hamas as a more moderate version of Islam. The argument between these two axes is how better to crush any democratic process in the Arab world. The same division of action appears between Fatah and Hamas, the first working with Saudi Arabia and Sisi’s Egypt, the second with Qatar.

The progressive forces in Israel are completely alienated from this discussion. The lack of a strong Arab Spring today – which could and should be an alternative to regimes such as Sisi, Assad and the other kingdoms and princedoms makes it more difficult for us to point toward a potential alternative.

Unfortunately the Arab Spring skipped over Palestine, and the most progressive demand was a call to unite Fatah and Hamas. But, what we see today is that as the war revealed the weakness of the Israeli left, it also revealed the weakness of the Palestinian side. It remains to see what remains of the current conciliation between Hamas and the PA, negotiated in Cairo.

For us, as a political force in Israel, the major obstacle to peace is the settlers and the settlements. Their existence prevents any political solution and the focus of any struggle should put that in the center.

Going back to the Arab Spring, for us it was an opening of hope because it presented a third alternative, other than the secular dictatorships (Egypt, Syria) or the fundamentalist forces of political Islam. The call for Freedom, Democracy and Social Change could be a common bridge between Arabs, Israelis and international progressive forces united by a vision of a new society, where everyone has the same rights and opportunities to live a meaningful life. This alternative is still open and waiting for forces to pick up the glove.

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As Israel’s media began marathon broadcasts on the three abducted Jewish youths, the world was busy with just one event: the fall of Mosul into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the disintegration of the Iraqi army. There is no apparent connection between the two, but one man dreamt up a connection and made full use of it for his own political ends. That man was Israel’s imaginative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The abduction and ISIS’s encroachment on Baghdad were an opportunity for Netanyahu to win back the world’s support for his political views. When he sent the mothers of the three youths to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on a weird propaganda mission entitled “Bring back our boys,” he already knew that they were no longer alive and that Hamas was taking no responsibility for the abduction. But for Netanyahu, everything is permitted in the struggle to regain the favor of the international community.

When the abduction was first known, Netanyahu convened the security cabinet to get government support for the military operation dubbed “Brother’s Keeper”, whose aim was to eliminate Hamas’ presence in the West Bank. The prime minister was granted a free hand. He used the abduction to demonstrate that “there is no partner” (for peace) and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), merely by agreeing to a joint Palestinian government with Hamas, supports terrorism. He used the advance of ISIS to shore up his outlook on security, according to which the Jordan River is Israel’s eastern border, and thus to negate the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Moreover, during the assembly of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Netanyahu declared that Israel supports the creation of an independent Kurdish state in the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan). Thus Netanyahu breaks up the Palestinian Authority by military operation and the state of Iraq by declaring a sovereign Kurdish state.

Everyone loves ISIS

Netanyahu is the first leader to call for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan in the face of US wrath. America called on the Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, to avoid such a step, because this would strengthen ISIS’s hold on Sunni regions and lead to Iraq’s disintegration. For Netanyahu, however, the main threat is not ISIS but Iran. In his opinion, with the creation of a Kurdish state, Israel would gain a friend on Iran’s border. This would serve as a counterweight to Lebanon, which Iran has shaped as its own outpost on Israel’s northern border.

These are tense moves in a fascinating game of chess in which Netanyahu takes advantage of Iraq’s and Syria’s disintegration to promote what he believes are Israel’s strategic interests. ISIS is doing the work not only for Netanyahu, but also for Saudi Arabia, which was very happy to hear that ISIS was hammering on the gates of Baghdad. Saudi Arabia would love to see the fall of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, the Saudi kingdom’s sworn enemy and the ally of Iran’s ayatollah regime.

Thus ISIS became the darling of both Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia, for ISIS hates the Shiites much more than it hates the Jews. At the same time, it is the darling of Syria’s Bashar Assad and Iraq’s Maliki: these two exploit the fears of the Americans and Europeans, who worry that Jihadists holding Western passports will bring the battle back to Europe and America. In a bid for the West’s support, Assad and Malaki portray Isis as the greater evil, while behind this scrim of fear they continue murdering or oppressing their own people. ISIS benefits in any case, but particularly from the anarchy caused by the decay of dictatorships from Egypt through the Persian Gulf to Syria and Iraq.

ISIS’s success cannot be disconnected from the Sunni uprisings in Iraq and Syria. After years of discrimination, suppression, economic exclusion, and hostility, Sunnis view Iran and its satellites in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon as their bitter enemies.

The fear of the Arab Spring

The “pragmatists” in the Zionist left, mainly Meretz and Labor Party supporters, stand in open-mouthed surprise as ISIS strengthens Netanyahu and the right wing. The latter are already talking about beefing up the security fence in the occupied Jordan Valley to defend Israel’s permanent presence there, an act that would put an end to any chance of agreement with the Palestinians. The Israeli left’s alternative is of course to strengthen Abu Mazen and link up with the Egypt-Saudi Arabia-Persian Gulf axis. This is a conservative, narrow Zionist perspective, which does not understand that the rise of ISIS is due to the Arab Spring’s failure to bring democracy to the Arab world.

The Arab Spring shook up all the regimes, but Saudi Arabia and Iran succeeded in suppressing the democratic uprising in two central states: Egypt and Syria. Saudi Arabia and Iran are indeed enemies, but they are united in their fear of any democratic change which threatens their regimes. Saudi Arabia took steps against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, because the Brotherhood was an expression of political Islam that gained power by adapting to the democratic game, as in Turkey and Tunisia. Iran, for its part, supports Assad, because his downfall is liable to spark renewed rebellion against the ayatollah regime, which has been under constant threat since the Green Revolution of 2009.

It is shortsighted to call for establishing a “moderate axis” with Abu Mazen as well as the Jordanian and Saudi kings, because each is perceived by his own people as a dictator, a traitor to the people’s interests. These regimes are so unstable that a few thousand ISIS fighters can shake up the entire region. Opposition to them is increasing all the time. It is a mistake to think that the Arab Spring is over. Demonstrations and strikes in Egypt continue, and those who follow the Egyptian media see heated debates and severe criticism of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime.

The revolutionary youth are hounded, but their popularity remains high. They are the alternative to ISIS and fundamentalist Islam, and they are struggling for democracy and economic development based on equality for the entire region. To count on the “moderate” Arab regimes is to count on the past and ignore the educated middle-class youth and the working class who constitute the Arab world’s future.

Netanyahu will one day yearn for Hamas

By his constant refusal to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, Netanyahu is building ISIS not only in Iraq and Syria but in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip too. ISIS broke away from Al Qaeda, which it saw as too moderate. The greater the suppression, poverty and exclusion, and the more the dictatorships suppress democratic change, the more extreme will the alternative be – in keeping with the people’s despair.

Hamas grew on the despair following the failure of the Oslo Accords and the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. Now, as Hamas takes a more moderate stand due to the Egyptian embargo and is willing to compromise with Abu Mazen, Netanyahu – like his Egyptian counterpart Sisi – is acting to eliminate it. If he succeeds – who will fill the vacuum? An even more extreme organization. Every call of “Death to the Arabs” shores up the call “Death to the Jews,” and every door closing on an agreement opens a door to fundamentalist Islam. There is no need for a vast number of extremists – it is enough to have a handful with public support.

The suppression of the democratic uprisings known as the Arab Spring did not lead to a “moderate axis” but to the rise of ISIS on the one hand, and, on the other, to the deepening of the Israeli right’s refusal to accept a just peace. This is the ground on which a local version of ISIS will flourish. ISIS is not far away; it is hammering on the doors of the Jordanian kingdom, growing roots in the Sinai Peninsula, and gaining support in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. No fence in the world will stop it from spreading.

ISIS is an emotional condition, an extreme expression of an extreme situation, and the more anarchy reigns, the more likely it is that Israel will find itself confronting ISIS. It is possible that Netanyahu, like Assad, Sisi and Maliki, will enjoy the world’s support as a “fighter against terrorism.” However, this will not help the people of Israel, who will have to cope with a very different situation than the one they have grown used to. It is not just “Judea and Samaria” that are “inside Israel,” as the settlers like to say, but ISIS too.

– Translated by Yonatan Preminger

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The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was a rare opportunity to drive the country towards the future by creating a democratic regime which would enable Egyptians to develop a political awareness. The Muslim Brotherhood is incapable of turning Egypt into a modern state, because its religious outlook directly opposes cultural and scientific freedom, while the oppression of women prevents Egypt from shaking off backwardness and social introversion. But this is no reason to support the generals and the military coup. The only way of contending with these issues is via democratic elections.

On July 7, the masses gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in an attempt to show the world that this was no ordinary military coup, but a correction to the revolution of January 25, 2011 that would lead Egypt to democracy. To enforce this picture, air force planes circled the skies over Cairo leaving trails of smoke in the colors of the Egyptian flag. The revolutionaries were angry with Obama because he didn’t give his blessing to the ousting of Morsi, and they pleaded with CNN to change its version and cease calling the events a coup.

But already by the following day the atmosphere had changed completely. The 51 victims, killed by the army as they demonstrated in front of the Republican Guard base where Morsi was being held, spoiled the party and brought the Egyptian nation and the world face to face with reality. The army and police explained that they had been attacked, but these explanations were insufficient. The world was not persuaded that the army had become the people’s army overnight. Straight after the massacre, the Salafist al-Nour Party and the Strong Egypt Party, which had split from the Muslim Brotherhood, announced they were leaving the coalition which supports the army. Al-Azhar, seat of Islamic learning, did the same. Egypt’s liberals, who gave their blessing to the overthrow, supported the army’s version and didn’t even bother to express sorrow at the deaths. While they halfheartedly called for a committee of inquiry, the army hurried to apportion blame and arrested 650 people associated with the Islamic faction suspected of terror acts.

The army: source of authority

The day after the killings, interim president Adly Mansour published a new constitutional order, basing his authority on the military order of July 3, 2013. He thus unequivocally revealed who really rules Egypt. The presidential order caused embarrassment among the political partners to the coup, especially the Tamarod movement and the National Salvation Front. They criticized the order, claiming it had been prepared by the army in secret and without consulting them. They were also concerned to discover that the order grants the interim president totalitarian authority.

While Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have already transferred 8 billion dollars in support of the new regime, in order to ensure the death of the Arab Spring which threatens the Saudi kingdom, the US administration is still dithering, unsure whether to define the events as a coup – which would mean the end of US aid. Israel’s call to continue the flow of support clearly demonstrates that for the Israelis and Americans, democracy in Egypt was never the issue – the most important thing was maintaining the Camp David peace agreement.

To make things easier for Obama, Mansour announced that new elections would be held within six months. But the absurdity is clear to all: how can free elections be held with the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood, as Obama demands, when the army is shutting down its offices and television channels and running a campaign of delegitimization, accusing them of terror? Thus the real intentions of the army, the National Salvation Front and Tamarod partners are exposed: to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from participating in elections, just as Mubarak had done before. The oft-repeated slogan since the unseating of Morsi has been, “There’s no going back.” But how can Egypt not go back if in six months’ time free elections are held and the Muslim Brotherhood is victorious, as it has been repeatedly since 2011?

Returning to the Mubarak era

The behavior of the “revolutionaries” shows clearly that democracy is of little interest to them. The appointment of Hazem el-Beblawi as prime minister indicates the regime’s intentions. Beblawi is a neoliberal economist whose role is to persuade the International Monetary Fund to support the regime and to dismantle the Egyptian system of food subsidies, which would lead to even greater poverty and hunger. The new regime has nothing to offer the workers’ movement, which is demanding a range of changes including an increase in the minimum wage. The stance taken by the National Salvation Front leader Mohamed el-Baradei shows just how much their position has changed: Baradei, who once demanded that the army withdraw from politics and spoke of human rights, is now granting the army a free hand. This is the same army that controls some 25% of the economy and is responsible for the killing of 51 Egyptian citizens as well as the undermining of freedom of association and freedom of speech.

Indeed, Egypt has returned to the old formula that ruled before the revolution. The Egyptian people are once again caught between Mubarak’s old regime, represented by the army and the liberals, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The television channels rapidly adjusted to the new situation; all speaking with one voice; and Mubarak’s spirit once again hovers over the Maspero Building from which official television is broadcast, just as it did for 30 long years. The position adopted by the leftist party and the Wafd Party in Mubarak’s days – better the army than the Muslim Brotherhood – once again reigns. The Egyptian people are caught in the middle, wallowing in poverty under the dictatorial and corrupt regime which makes citizens mere shadows lacking all rights – the same regime against which it rose up just two and a half years ago.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a symptom of Egypt’s problems, not the cause. Its rise to prominence is the result of 60 years of dictatorship, of rapid population growth, of poverty and illiteracy, of the collapse of crucial infrastructure, and of disconnection from the modern world. This is the cradle of the Islamic movement.

The weakness of the Left

The Egyptian revolution was a rare opportunity to drive the country towards the future by creating a democratic regime which would enable Egyptians to develop a political awareness. The Muslim Brotherhood is incapable of turning Egypt into a modern state, because its religious outlook directly opposes cultural and scientific freedom, while the oppression of women prevents Egypt from shaking off backwardness and social introversion. But this is no reason to support the generals and the military coup. The only way of contending with these issues is via democratic elections.

Egypt took the path of military coup not because of Morsi and Islamization, but because of the weakness of the Left and of the liberals. They didn’t believe they could win in free elections, they fear and loathe the poor because they can be bought for “a bag of sugar and a can of oil,” and thus they preferred to take Egypt back to the old regime. Moreover, their economic outlook is no different from that of the Islamists: both seek the support of the US and the IMF.

A revolution is not a quick fix; it is a long process of struggle between different worldviews, over programs to take Egypt forward. But the youth of Tamarod, the Left, and the Muslim Brotherhood have no such program. Nor does the army have a solution to Egypt’s pressing problems.

The future is uncertain of course, but it is impossible to erase the revolution of 2011 and the deep change of consciousness it wrought. The enormous rallies in Tahrir Square supporting the coup, and the rallies in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, should make it clear that one cannot ignore half a nation, and that the fighting between the two sides plays into the hands of the army. The choice is stark: either the two camps cooperate and set up a democratic regime to save Egypt, or the country will continue to rot under the burden of dictatorship for many long years. If the political forces don’t come to their senses, the Egyptian people will get rid of them. The Egyptian nation sparked the revolution of 2011; the political parties have merely sullied it. The youth of the revolution should create a revolutionary “roadmap” of their own, to save democracy and to ensure their future and the future of their nation.

Translated by Yonatan Preminger

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Istanbul, and with it all the major Turkish cities, has risen against what is regarded as the dictatorship of the Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In our consciousness, Taksim and Tahrir squares have merged, Habib Borgeiva Boulevard has become one with Al-Abasain square in Damascus, and it seems that we are witnessing yet another event of the sort we have seen since the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011. This resemblance derives not only from the nonviolent nature of the Turkish rallies and demonstrations, but also from the fact that their initiators are young, middle class men and women, who used social media to mobilize and publicize their activism, steering away from the traditional political parties and the self-censoring mainstream media.

Despite the similarities, there are significant differences between the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria on the one hand, and the events in Turkey on the other. Erdoğan is not an all-powerful dictator, as were Mubarak and Bin-Ali. He uses water cannons rather than bullets or Scad missiles to suppress the protests. He was voted in democratically and has been appreciated by his people throughout the years of his administration. He was able to take Turkey out of a deep financial crisis and lead the country’s economy into unprecedented development, turning it into one of the most important economies in the world. Nevertheless, there is a common thread that connects the events in Turkey, Egypt, and even Syria.

The Test of Political Islam

The common denominator is obvious. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party strikes a resemblance to Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, and despite the differences between them, the behavior of Egypt’s Morsi is similar to Erdogan’s. Both leaders represent political Islam, while adopting a neoliberal economic approach, which prefers private capital and privatization over a welfare state that curtails social gaps. Another common characteristic is the exploitation of the majority achieved in democratic elections to enforce an Islamic constitution and an Islamic lifestyle, despite fierce opposition by a large, influential, secular and urban ‘minority’.

Some describe the actions of the Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party as an attempt at Islamization. Similarly, Erdogan is trying to overthrow the principles of the secular state, as determined by Mustafah Kamal Ataturk. Egypt’s youth are revolting against Morsi’s attempt to hijack the revolution of January 25, 2011. They have created “the rebellion” movement, which has collected over 7 million signatures demanding Morsi’s resignation. The youth of Taksim square are carrying Ataturk’s portrait in the demonstrations and protesting against Erdogan’s new laws, the latest of which restrict the selling of alcohol and interfere with women’s dress codes.

These days, the entire region is united by the open struggle between Islamist and secular currents: between political Islam with a capitalist approach and the liberal, secular stream supporting the welfare state. This shared struggle connects the local struggles taking place in Egypt, Tunisia, and now Turkey. It is the first time that political Islam is being tested while in power. In addition, the social meaning of the slogan “Islam is the solution” is being challenged. The question being asked is: Can democracy coincide with a view that considers all secular people as infidels, that disqualifies their way of life and worldview, and prevents them from fulfilling their civil rights?

In fact, the revolutionary youth and the civilian forces are coming to terms with an uneasy truth: that their concentration in large cities such as Alexandria, Cairo and Istanbul, their adoption of modern a life-style enabled by information technology, and their connection with the developed world—all while the majority lives in rural poverty and ignorance—have played into the hands of the Islamist movements. With their incitement, the Islamists are creating sharp divisions between the poor and the middle class, the village and the city, ignorance and knowledge. They are relying on these chasms to achieve a majority in the elections.

The April 6th movement in Egypt, which tied the struggle against dictatorship to the exploitation and privatization in the factories of Al-Mahla Al-Kubra, pulled the rug from beneath the Islamist movement. The cry “Bread, Liberty, Social Justice” is a revolutionary chant, opposing the slogan that “Islam is the Solution”, which does not promise a life of dignity, does not recognize

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A political statement by Daam Workers Party on the recent Israeli air strikes in Syria

Daam Workers Party condemns the Israeli bombings of targets in Syria, especially in the heart of Damascus. This is blatant interference in the process that is underway in Syria, and it harms the revolution of the Syrian people: the struggle to topple the Assad regime and to live in dignity. Israel – which has been occupying the West Bank and the Golan Heights for decades, and which conducts an inhumane siege on Gaza – has no right to carry out an aggression which could lead to a regional war.

The Israeli adventure plays into the hands of the Assad regime, which conducts a barbaric attack on the Syrian people with support from Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah. The bombardment lends a sheen of credibility to Assad’s false claim that the revolution is an Israeli-American initiative. In recent days the regime, together with Hezbollah, has perpetrated a horrible massacre in the cities of Banias and Kassir; this is part of a program of ethnic cleansing, meant to terrorize the population and quell the revolution. The Israeli attacks distract attention from these crimes, putting the limelight instead on Israel’s long conflict with the Arab world. This is gratuitous service to the Assad regime.

The Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, which represents the Syrian people, demands international action in order to defend the civilian population and stop the massacres. The international community’s ongoing refusal to fulfill this demand has cost more than 70,000 lives, while the number of wounded and imprisoned is in the hundreds of thousands and the number of refugees in the millions. The world’s silence is destroying Syria. In the midst of it, Israel attacks without getting international or Arab support for its actions. Israel’s purpose is to show its strategic dominance over the region. It has nothing to do with the interests or the aspirations of the Syrian people which Israel never respected.

The toppling of the Syrian or Iranian regime does not interest Israel. The struggle belongs to the Syrian and Iranian peoples, which pit themselves against Fascist dictatorial regimes. The future of Hezbollah in Lebanon is likewise the interest of the Lebanese people, which has been hostage to Hezbollah’s sectarian ambitions.

Daam calls on public opinion in Israel and the world to take an unequivocal stand against the right-wing Israeli government and to call for an end to aggression, an end to the policy of occupation and settlements, and an end to the attitude of refusal that prevents a peace agreement.

We bend our heads before the Syrian revolution and its victims!

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Shany Littman

From Haaretz Weekend Supplement (Hebrew), January 5, 2013

2645. That’s the number of votes the Daam Party received in the previous elections. But since the outbreak of social unrest, the socialist Daam party has become a hot trend in Tel Aviv. Party leader Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka explains why poverty is no less an evil than the Occupation, why she wouldn’t have sailed on the Marmara, and why there is still hope in the Middle East.

Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka is ecstatic. For the first time she sees clearly that the way to the Knesset in Jerusalem is shorter than ever. She is convinced that this time the Daam Workers Party, which she chairs, will cross the threshold, despite the fact that tens of thousands of votes stand between success and the 2645 votes received by the party in the 2009 elections. In an interview I conducted with her before the last elections four years ago, she seemed more introverted, more serious, working diligently yet without hope. But something has changed in four years, something that even she never envisioned would happen so quickly, although she had been waiting impatiently.

This change has filled her sails with a wind that she herself defines as “wild”. Today it’s hard to actually stop the flow of her words and enthusiasm, regardless of agreement or disagreement with her positions. It is impossible not to be impressed by her conviction. “In 2009,” she says, “we talked about social justice. It was our vision, but it wasn’t relevant to the public’s consciousness at the time, and this was also reflected at the polls. Yet the protest of Summer 2011 brought a change. As long as people here were not really suffering, they were not looking for solutions. But when the shock waves started in Europe and the Arab world, they arrived in Israel too. A lot of people got courage to speak out; each one’s private problem became a collective issue of social justice.

“When social ills became a political question, Daam became relevant, and for the first time we were there as a political party because we knew this was the place to build strength. Fundamental social, economic and political change requires a movement that wants it. As long as there was no movement, Daam was a fish out of water. But now it’s harvest time. In the summer of 2011 we narrowed the gap between reality and the prevailing political consciousness.”

You didn’t expect this?

“I didn’t know it would happen so fast. It’s very exciting. I’m glad to be part of it. I’m part of this and happy that I made the right investment in social justice. The role of the party that wants to lead this is to look ahead. I have a vision and it wasn’t clear to people—to talk about Jews and Arabs, about socialism, social justice. They thought I was dreaming, that all Arabs hate Jews and all Jews hate Arabs. And I know that’s not true. At a certain point, because reality is crushing you, because it empties your pockets and kills your children, you start to think. When Muhammad Boazizi set fire to himself, the flame burnt down all the barriers and walls after 40 years of deadly silence in the Arab world.

“40 years of Gaddafi, 40 years of the Assad family. For too many decades people were silent. Arabic poetry and literature deal with how this people amounts to zero. Nizar Qabbani has a poem that says, ‘We created the zero and remained zeros.’ We grew up on disappointment, on ‘Naksa’ [the ‘setback’ of the 1967 War], on defeat, on impotence. And suddenly a resurrected people demands to live. They do not want to die in violent resistance. They do not want to go to paradise. A new historical era has opened. It was natural that it would open on Rothschild as well.”

The Marmara was a mistake

There were moments when it seemed like things were going to turn into a catastrophe. On the one hand, Agbarieh-Zahalka describes feelings of elation as she walked through a crowd of demonstrators who marched in unison for a social cause. On the other hand, there were moments when bitter reality slapped her in the face. In June 2012 at Tel Aviv Museum Square, during a demonstration commemorating the first anniversary of the social protest, the rally organizers refused to allow Wafah Tayara, No. 4 on the Daam list, to mount the stage to speak, although this had been agreed upon in advance. Agbarieh-Zahalka experienced the refusal as a racist act that came from a completely unexpected place. Her outcry appears in a video clip circulated on the internet; it is a kind of spontaneous speech delivered not on stage but among the demonstrators. She recalls, “On the one hand, we have created a new group of people here, the people of the protest. That’s where I felt most at home. I felt I was in Tahrir Square. But when Wafah was prevented from speaking at the demonstration, I felt it was the end. All the time we’d been saying that Jews and Arabs could work together, and now she wasn’t allowed to speak. Then, when the video clip was shown, we were flooded with views and comments. Many people came as a result of the clip. It was the first time people had heard of us. That was the day that Daam was born in the eyes of the public, precisely because of the rejection.”

Agbarieh-Zahalka was born in Jaffa 39 years ago, the scion on her father’s side of a large family from Umm al-Fahm. During adolescence her religious faith grew and she joined the Islamic Movement. In 1995, while she was studying at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Humanities, the Daam party offered her a job as editor of the Arabic newspaper, “Al-Sabar.” When she got to meet the party activists, she was surprised to hear Jews speaking fluent Arabic; gradually she underwent a change, joining the party and eventually becoming its leader. In 2006 she was the only woman who headed a party for the Knesset. In 2009, she was joined in this respect by Tzipi Livni; in 2013, she stands beside Livni, Shelly Yachimovich and Zahava Galon, four women leading political parties. For Asma, however, this fact does not create solidarity or identification, just as she rejects any attempt to find similarities between herself and Hanin Zoabi, Balad MK.

“The Arab party Balad is nationalistic and bourgeois; it’s not a political party that espouses social justice. I do not compete with Hanin Zoabi. Hers is not the public I seek. I appeal to the 50% of the Arab population that is tired by the political options the Arab parties offer. Arab parties advocate a nationalist discourse, dealing only with the national question, neglecting the socioeconomic questions and the hardships suffered by the Arab public. Gaza and Tel Aviv amount to one issue. The political has to go along with the social. There is 50% poverty in the Arab street; 80% of women in the Arab sector don’t work. That is a catastrophe. Is this a people that can think about freeing Palestine? This is a people that must first free itself. And the point is not expressed by anyone.

“No political party does real work in the field, organizing the public and fighting against contracted jobs. I go to Knesset committee meetings and don’t see any Arab representatives there, even when the issues dealt with are of great concern to the Arab public, such as on-the-job safety. What is this concern for the Nakba [the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948] all day long? They forget that today in every house there is a Nakba. When a woman doesn’t have work; that’s a Nakba. A young man who works through a contractor and doesn’t get his rights is a Nakba. And without denying the importance of the Nakba, what about today’s Nakba? You have to change the reality of today; you can’t change past history.”

The fact that you and Zoabi are Arab women going against the current doesn’t seem to you like a thing that can bring your agendas closer together?

“It’s not enough to be a woman. Shelly Yachimovich is a woman too. So is Tzipi Livni. Being a woman is good, but it’s not enough. It is also not enough to be an Arab. Bashar al-Assad is an Arab too. I want to turn cultural diversity into a force, and Zoabi makes it into a wall separating people. I do not want people to vote for me because I am an Arab. That’s not the ticket I want. The question is, ‘what kind of Arab are you?’ I stand for class identity. I think that class identity is much more correct in places like Israel, which are saturated with different sectors and with an ingathering of exiles, including Arabs. What could connect and advance people, I think, is the daring to get out of sectarianism, to get out of the ghetto. And Zoabi is stuck in the ghetto, isolated and differentiating.

“Today, the issue that connects everyone is the issue of socioeconomic justice. It is the natural right of all people whoever they are. We are equal; together we can build a third way; the third way that the Arab Spring offered. Do not give in to the United States and Israel’s decrees against the Palestinians, but do not succumb either to the verbiage of the nationalist, fundamentalist opposition of which Zoabi is a part. I cannot call for death. The way of violent resistance, which Hamas walked in and which Hezbollah walks in, we see what that has led to today—to the massacre of the Syrian people. I can’t be part of it. I’ve never been a part of it, and for this reason I wasn’t relevant to the Arab public, because of this unpopular position. An Arab has to be democratic, to give people freedom of speech and the chance to work with dignity; if you do not do this, the fact that you’re an Arab doesn’t interest me.”

What do you think about Zoabi’s boarding the Marmara?

“I would not have boarded the Marmara. I do not think she’ll board the Marmara again. Beyond the issue of isolation and differentiation and representing yourself as ‘against’ and ‘anti,’ I think that to board the Marmara was to give Hamas power against Abu Mazen. I am not for Abu Mazen and not for Hamas; what I am for is that the Palestinian left should build a third way. Once you support one side against the other, the Palestinian rift deepens. And I do not think it’s in the interest of the Palestinian people to deepen the schism while it stands against Israel and against the Occupation. This strategy was wrong for Palestinians.”

Hanin Zoabi’s response: “I do not want to address these things. They are no different from the things said against me by the right and by the Zionist left. The only significant contribution of Ms. Asma Agbarieh is burning about 3000 votes in each election and it certainly does not help the Arab public and does not benefit the poor in general.”

Reality will win

You say that there is readiness to accept your ideas in relation to class consciousness, but what about racism on both sides? Do you think that today Jews or Arabs are ready to vote for an Arab-Jewish party?

“I probably will not be Prime Minister. Not all of the public will vote for me. As for the public that insists on racism—I’ll wait for them. I will continue to believe, just as I believed that the time of social justice would arrive, that understanding would ripen, so I believe that the time will come when people will outgrow racism. I also believe that some will follow racism to the end, to fascism. I’m not naive. But racism is a form of false consciousness in which you think you have privileges as a Jew in Israel, but actually you don’t. Today this country is a state of the rich, not a Jewish state. To whoever understands this and experiences it in his their pockets, in his their refrigerator, in the cost of living, in the their ability to make ends meet, to whoever has experienced it in everyday life, I suggest that they stop blaming his the situation on the Arab, but rather blame the policy that is made in their name as a Jew, and that they should simply change the diskette.

“I know that the whole country will not vote Daam. It also presents a challenge to the Jewish public to vote for an Arab woman, although we are an Arab-Jewish party, not just Arab, and it is a challenge to Arab society to vote for a party headed by a woman. Every day we have discussion groups all over the country. I’ve met with Russians and Mizrahis. In all these meetings I’ve found that our message is received like water on dry ground. People can’t get enough. It’s a golden opportunity, and I’m going with it to the Arab street, which has not budged, which did not take part in the protests. I tell them, look at how the Jewish community accepts us. Look how they accept an Arab woman who tells them to their face how to deal with the Occupation, with racism and the economics of privatization. They are shocked, because Arabs have long since stopped talking with Jews and Jews with Arabs.”

You really think you can make them think otherwise?

“It’s not me that will succeed. Reality will.”

At least wouldn’t it be better to change the name to something that didn’t sound like an Arab political party?

“Balad is Hebrew – the National Democratic Alliance. Hadash is a word in Hebrew. Did it help anyone? Most of their voters are Arabs. Daam started out in the Arab sector with the position that the Occupation must end. That was in the years when we did not experience the power of privatization and globalization. Two decades have passed since then and the reality in Israel has changed dramatically. Daam found that it also meets the needs of a growing segment of the Jewish public. We changed from a party on the nationalist side of the political map to a party on the socialist, class side. We have not changed the name and I think it is right because the Arab name is a type of connection, a link; it is a uniting factor. It connects with leftist movements in Arab countries, and it also reminds Israelis that there are Arabs who face a political issue and that there is an existential problem. The name is like a litmus test to the Jewish people who come and say, ‘I want to connect with the Arabs, to leave the ghetto, to connect with the Palestinians.’ The word is an acronym for the original name in Arabic, which means support and solidarity. Originally the name was ‘Organization for Democratic Action.’ The name is a challenge we do not want to conceal. We live in the Middle East.”

It seems that you have no separation between politics and your personal life.

Agbarieh-Zahalka laughs. “Yes, someone pays a price, my son Adam and my spouse Musa. But there’s nothing I can do about it. At the age of 22, I decided that I would not live well while people around me were sinking. I could have, but I chose not to. One cannot survive without the people around one. So I am drawn to this matter. My child will not grow up in a society that exploits its workers and destroys the people within it. That’s not why I brought him into the world. I accept the fact that I brought him into a world where I would prepare a normal environment for him to live in. I’m not doing it for me, but for him.

“There’s no political career here. Of course I am a mother who hugs her child. I do not feed him Marxism. I play with him in the playground. We even ate at McDonald’s. Right now it does not happen a lot, because of the elections, but Musa makes up for it. I see him three hours a day at best, and I tell him that Mom is going to talk to people who care about giving toys to all the children. He said he wants some too, and I promised him he would get them.”

– Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Rosenstein

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