Gaza Freedom March: A summary report of the Interfaith Satyagraha Walk

Even though we might be made blind to the evil afoot, we will not be silent. This is the lesson of modern history. We will sing a new song as strangers in a strange land: Let My People Go. While the Egyptians, Israelis, and Americans conspire to keep us from seeing the conditions of life in the world’s largest prison (sorry, no visiting hours this month), there is a chorus, a voice, 43 nations rich, which is lifted in greater harmony and crescendo than ever before to call for raising the siege of Gaza and thereby increasing the security of Israel.

So many of the metaphors and rhetorical flourishes of chants and psalms that were a part of the gathering in Egypt, in support of ending the blockade of Gaza, come out of the stories of exile and Diaspora of the Jewish people. The Gazans have now been recast as the persecuted of the lands of Judea and Samaria. In so many of those stories Pharaoh was the tyrant, making Egypt an easy party to demonize and hold responsible for our sense of being held hostage by the State. But the response of the French Embassy, U.S. Embassy and Congressional representatives, and the United Nations all make clear that the levers of power are shared, if not completely controlled, by Egypt’s partners. So much of the experience appears to have been intended to divert attention from the continued blockade of Gaza and focus attention on the delegation’s challenges. In the end, the strategy failed if it is judged by the level of international press attention and the radicalizing of a tipping point of the travelers on this pilgrimage. We may have come hoping for a miracle, but we left prepared to make our own changes to the balance of power in the world.

Divide and Conquer

The organizing structures of the March lent themselves to the Egyptian tactic, implemented from the beginning, to separate the mass of 1,362 delegates into smaller groups and to prevent their ever collecting in one place at one time. The Gaza Freedom March quickly grew beyond its capacity to organize in an unknown venue.

Organized around multiple identities and thus diluting the cohesive potential of the affinity groups, the March was often consumed by trying to create or recover consensus and distracted from its goal of throwing a bright light on the siege of Gaza. Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and I co-convened a spiritually-focused affinity group under the name of the Interfaith Satyagraha Peacewalk. We included more than 40 individuals in our conversations prior to arriving in Cairo, but we never gathered more than two dozen in any one meeting. I was also understood to be a part of the New York Delegation, and others in our group saw themselves as similarly geographically affiliated, nationally affiliated, part of the Women’s Group, trainers in nonviolence, or engaged in a hunger strike.

There was no tested decision-making process to guide tough decisions which had to be made in short periods of time. Offers to convene groups for training were advanced but only slowly embraced and even then competed with other choices at any given hour. And yet these challenges also worked, in the end, to open possibilities of new tactics and rising leadership.

Public Training in Nonviolence

The tolerance for smaller gatherings also offered some ironies. A team of ten of us drafted a curriculum for preparation in nonviolence practices after demonstrations at the U.N. headquarters and a solidarity gathering at the Journalist Syndicate on December 29th and 30th. Lacking a suitable meeting room in any local hotel, we broadcast a set of meeting times for the largest public plaza in the area, Tahrir (Independence) Square. As we started in a group of 30 to do our first two-hour session, a plain-clothed officer approached me about our intention — “was this going to lead to an action?” I answered that we were simply an international community of like-minded individuals, and since we were not allowed to gather in a single large group, we thought we would spend time getting to know one another in smaller groups throughout the day. (Meanwhile an American group was being man-handled at the doors of the U.S. embassy and the sidewalk encampment of 250+ at the French Embassy continued under close police containment and supervision). A number of plain-clothed policemen were assigned “for our safety” to keep others away from us and to listen in on our conversations. (During one of the dyad exercises I had a long conversation with one of the officers assigned to us. His English was unaccented and we shared our educational backgrounds, our interests in literature. I explained our reason for being in Egypt and our desire to go to Gaza. It seemed to be enough of an explanation for him to wander further away for the balance of the exercise.) Another circle of 30 gathered with Starhawk an hour and a half later and as the sun set we finished a day of rudimentary preparation for nonviolence for a large number of novices who had come expecting to being walking in solidarity in Gaza, not confronting shield-faced, trudgeon-belted, uniformed policemen on the streets of Cairo. If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans...

Women First

The community may have underestimated the depth of male chauvinism in Egyptian society. Significant leadership from the very beginning had come from Code Pink and from women throughout the peace movement with particular history in the Israel/Palestine conflict. International leadership provided by women was also evident form the beginning. Given the fact that conservative and fundamentalist Islam (threads of which were evident in the police assigned to our “care”) condones physical punishment of non-conformists and of women before men, putting women at the front of actions was taunting the Egyptians. The plains-clothes policemen (wearing winter jackets to conceal pistols), took clear pleasure in striking women and pulling them about by their hair. Men they kicked while they were down in puppy piles, and pummeled to the point of drawing blood. I was impressed with the leadership and inspired, learning to allow myself to let go of an ego-grounded call to the front line and serving instead to pull people over the barriers into safer areas of sidewalk.

We Are Not Afraid: The Power of Nonviolence

The turning point in the relationship with the Egyptian police, I thought, was that once confined to “Free Gaza Plaza” the gathered began to celebrate with song and dance. The beauty of song is often its simplicity. The phrases “Free Gaza,” “We shall not be moved,” and “We are not afraid” were so easily understood to say that those attacked were unmoved by violence and intimidation that a grudging respect seemed to emerge on the police lines. Voices rose with greatest passion and authenticity on precisely those phrases. By the time the Horah circle transformed to a Dabke line, the soldiers began expanding the space in which the group was confined by stepping back a few paces every few minutes, dropping their interlocked arms, and allowing restrained smiles to break their lips. When the group voted to disband after six hours, the restraining lines opened and people walked away without further molestation ... to plan another action.

Strangers in a Strange Land: Culture Is Still a Mystery

One can only speculate. It is hard to imagine what advantage accrued to Egypt of holding the GFM in Cairo for a week. Certainly a week of tourism dollars was welcome, though this was not a group that booked four-star hotel rooms, ate three meals a day, or shopped for antiques. It would have been easier, I would have thought, to provide the buses requested and taken the group to Al Arish and locked us down with the few who had made it that far before the masses arrived. But perhaps the same level of containment was not possible at that distance from Cairo. After the March there have been hints that various governments were sharing intelligence of prospective violence once the group were admitted to Gaza. The coincidence of the announcement and beginning of work on a subterranean wall along the Egypt-Gaza border had led to some public exchanges of gun-fire near the Rafah border. The gate had not been opened in some time, no doubt intensifying conditions there. The Viva Palestina caravan, led by British MP George Galloway. was scheduled to arrive just ahead of the Gaza Freedom March. The anniversary of Operation Cast Lead and the recent release of the Goldstone Report, while purposefully chosen and fortuitously leading to heightening the media potential of the March, also likely increased the levels of concern by all parties. And finally, the culture of totalitarianism is, oxymoronically, impenetrable.

The Spectacle

I remember once trying to find an open checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem in a private car of a Palestinian colleague from East Jerusalem. We would fall into a line of cars that appeared to be moving through a checkpoint, only to have it closed and to see all the cars in line do simultaneous 180 degree turns and head to another checkpoint, racing through back streets which became clogged with the routine and to repeat the exercise at the next gate. It reminded me of nothing more than a Keystone Cops silent movie. It defined life in the occupied territories as a Tragedy disguised as a Comedy.

It redefines the Gaza Freedom March effort to lift the siege of Gaza in the same way. The drama was intense, and as one analyst from the Palestine Think Tank suggests, surely Israeli, Egyptian, and American strategists are still laughing at the naïveté of confronting state power with the tools of civil society. But the underlying point is that this is an ongoing tragedy and we are all the authors and actors, not simply the audience.

Joseph Kip Kosek, in his book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy, points repeatedly to E.A. Ross’s sociological analysis of the role of spectacle in the work of active nonviolence. The banner headlines and photo-montages in all of the major Egyptian newspapers suggest that Cairo has not enjoyed such spectacles in a long time (one headline, over a photograph of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and FOR members Russ Greenleaf from Louisville, Kentucky, and Margaret Hawthorne of Amherst, Massachusetts, suggested there had been no protests in front of the Israeli embassy in decades). While a symbolic truck-load of humanitarian aide was delivered to Gaza with the two-bus delegation, and while some portion of Viva Palestina’s caravan has now crossed into Gaza, the repeated affirmation was that we were not gathered to distribute charity but to raise awareness and stand in solidarity with an oppressed people.

Someone will finally calculate the number of stories, column inches or press minutes of airtime, number of videos posted on YouTube, but until that time my anecdotal experience is that though there was not widespread coverage in mainline U.S. media, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the Christian Science Monitor were only a few of the many that did carry stories. The world press and blogosphere was very busy. It also appears that the hunger strike, a quintessential act of witness and solidarity, was the lead story for many news sources and clearly affirmed with appreciation by those in the Gaza Strip. The goals of media attention and solidarity were realized.

The Costs and Constraints of Delegation Leadership

I engaged from the beginning in the Gaza Freedom March in partnership with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb who had proposed an Interfaith Gaza Satyagraha as an affinity group within the larger march, part of a tradition of nonviolent pilgrimages and as a safe haven for those whose faith grounded their participation and who feared that the role of witness might be obscured by political tensions, realities, and necessities.

One of my strengths is logistical thinking. It was sorely tried by conditions in Cairo, but to the extent it could be brought to bear it did strengthen the group’s spirit. We had three weekly calls before leaving for Egypt, and we met five mornings for worship and reflection while in Egypt. We gravitated to one another’s presence in actions and wore a white sash (courtesy of Julie Moenck from Colorado) as a reminder that we represented a peace witness of love and solidarity.

We created a peace line between some delegates who wished to agitate the young policemen surrounding us, and along the lines they formed at both the United Nations headquarters and in “Free Gaza Plaza,” as the area opposite the Egyptian Museum was labeled. We led singing and dancing and witnessed silently to slogans and chants. Many of our number joined the fast inaugurated by Hedy Epstein, though not all the fasters identified with the Interfaith Satyagraha. Some rituals grew out of the whole community’s sensibilities: a candlelight vigil on New Year’s Eve in Tahrir Square, for example. Other commitments of the whole community sprang from input we offered early on, such as the signing of a commitment to nonviolence, and a proposed walk in the Satyagraha tradition of Gandhi. We served as a weaving that brought the moral/ethical, theological, political, and pragmatic commitments to nonviolence that were present in the motivations of many into relationship with one another.

One internet story on the GFM concludes this way: “However, for millions of Palestinians who routinely feel abandoned by the international community, the most poignant effect of the Gaza Freedom March may be the message of worldwide solidarity embodied by marchers. 'During these years, we have felt unheard, unnoticed, and even unworthy,' writes Zeina Abu Innab, a Palestinian resident of Jordan. 'You have revealed that this is no longer the case... You have shown us that somewhere, sometime, there are people who hear the cries of Palestinians under siege and occupation. ... You have given us strength by proving to us that we are no longer alone. This is an aspiration that we do not take lightly.' Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza, adds, 'For us, a population of 1.6 million being imprisoned and starved, the gratitude we express to you, the Gaza freedom marchers, is immense. Thank you all from the depth of our hearts!'”