A Full Moon over Tahrir Square
As we gathered with candles under a full moon, directly overhead, at the edge of Tahrir (Freedom) Square, in Cairo, Egypt, the few hundred here welcomed the New Year with increased hope that a week together might offer the momentum to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East and the release of Gazan Palestinians in particular from the state of siege they have suffered most intensely throughout the year just ended.
Gaza Freedom March sit-in on Murad Street, Cairo (Image: Flickr user Mashahed)
Meanwhile across the Nile a group of another few hundred French delegates entered their fifth day of “vigil” in front of the French Embassy where they had been encamped and surrounded by 150 helmeted policemen for five days. The French staged the first demonstration to demand that their government work to open the Raffah Gate into Gaza for the 1362 delegates from 42 countries who had come to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza. Absent progress on their call they refused to be moved. Tonight, conceding a certain kind of defeat and another kind of victory, they disbanded their camp to head home to France.
In Gaza, another 100 delegates were able to join with a Palestinian community of a reported 500 and walk to the Erez crossing as originally planned. By special arrangement through First Lady Susan Mubarak, a representative delegation was permitted to leave on the 31st with a truck of humanitarian supplies for Gaza.
There, the international delegation, after a twenty hour trip to cover six hours of highway, walked to within 500 feet of the northern gate and sat in protest of the lock-down that gate represents. Within that delegation were at least two dozen who had spent a week under virtual house arrest in Al Arish where they had arrived ahead of the planned transfer of all 1300+ delegates the day after arriving in Cairo.
The larger Cairo based delegation staged actions in front of the United Nations Development Offices with responsibility for Gaza, the U.S. Embassy and Israeli Embassy (spearheaded by the dozens of Jewish delegates from around the world) and, for six hours on New Year’s Eve, on a sidewalk opposite the Egyptian Museum in Downtown Cairo.
Gaza Freedom Marchers demonstrate at UN building in Cairo (Image: Middle East Children’s Alliance)
After encounters, including brutality at the hands of Egyptian police (carried on the front page of a number of Egyptian papers on New Year’s Day), the New Year’s evening gathering gave evidence that the Egyptians were beginning to appreciate active nonviolence and passive resistance. Skilled in moving crowds out of streets and into carefully barricaded pens (Cairo corrals is what some Lakota delegates called them), they finally allowed the New Year’s eve vigil to proceed in peace., despite Egyptian law prohibiting the gathering of more than five people in a public space.
The evening concluded with a live telephone call to the party being held in Gaza City for all of us. Even in Gaza perhaps they will begin the New Year, at least, with some leftovers from a party we all wanted to be at but weren’t permitted to attend.
The Interfaith Delegation, created under the shared leadership of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and myself, attracted more than forty participants, many of them familiar to FOR including former Executive Director John Dear, David and Jan Hartsough, Martha Hennessy (Dorothy Day’s granddaughter), Father Louie Vitale, and Iran Program Director Leila Zand.
The week demonstrated that the forces of the powers that be are formidable but the witness of those committed to truth, love and social justice is powerful too.
I leave Cairo disappointed not to have been able to stand side by side with Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza, and knowing that there is enormous work that needs to be done if we are to effectively bring to bear the lessons of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, to the world today. But I also leave confident that the witness of the past week will require still more of the world to consider more carefully the desperate and inhumane conditions of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the urgency for the Israelis and Palestinians to construct a future of peaceful co-existence and mutual respect or human rights. The weight of public opinion and the burden of international law are shifting; the issues need to be addressed and resolved. This would be a good resolution and goal for the year ahead.
