Ten days in the Cairo Corral

BY DAVID TILSEN

Who isn’t horrified by the situation in Gaza? It has been called the largest open-air prison in the world, a ghetto, or simply a violation of human rights by more organizations and journalists and bloggers than I can name. To summarize quickly, Gaza is a 25-mile-long narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea that Israel captured from Egypt in June of 1967.

The people who lived there in 1967 did not consider themselves Egyptians (their land only became part of Egypt in 1948 when the United Nations partitioned Palestine and created the state of Israel) and the people who live there now do not consider themselves Israeli. They call themselves Palestinians.

The claim to the land is disputed, but as far as I can see, Palestinians and Israeli Jews are very closely related. They are both descended from the Semitic tribes in the area; both are highly literate, educated people; their languages, Hebrew and Arabic, are very similar; and in a reasonable world they should be cousins if not brothers and sisters. This was not to be.

The creation of Israel was the culmination of over 50 years of effort to colonize the area by European Jewish investors and religious zealots. The existence of an indigenous population was sometimes denied, sometimes ignored, and was never considered a barrier.

Israel quickly became a client state of Europe and the United States and very quickly started to remake the area into a modern post World War II middle class state, complete with malls, freeways, billboards and fast food restaurants. Just like the American Indians, the people who lived on the soon-to-be profitable land had to be pushed out. The difference here is that the neighboring states found an ally in the other major cold war power, the USSR, and very quickly the area became a battleground for international diplomacy to the detriment of the people who lived there.

Flash forward to 2006. The Soviet Union has fallen, Egypt and Jordan have been brought, to varying degrees, into the US/NATO fold, and the Gazans are told that Israel will no longer occupy them, and they can elect their own government. Of course when Gaza elected Hamas, to all appearances a group of fanatical ultra religious thugs and terrorists, Israel could not just sit by. The decision was to starve them out, withhold any money that was in international banks, or due to them. When Hamas, in 2008 responded by lobbing some inaccurate and poorly made rockets into Israel, then Israel bombed them into rubble killing 1,400 people.
A pro-Israel, Jewish judge named Goldstone was asked by the United States to investigate the situation, and he found gross violations of international law and human rights. Many Israeli solders are now unwilling to travel outside their country for fear of being arrested and charged with war crimes.

Amidst all of this, and much more, the siege continues, and on the one-year anniversary of the bombing, international peace activists from all over the world decided to go to Gaza and march with the people of Gaza to call for peace. I decided it was time for me, as an American Jew, to go and see if this madness could be understood and to help do my part for peace.

As Gaza is bordered by Israel (the No. 1 recipient of U.S. aid) and Egypt (the No. 2 recipient of U.S. aid), the decision was made to go to Egypt. The peace organization Code Pink stepped up and agreed to manage and lead the U.S. contingent and received some assurance that Egypt would let the peace marchers into Gaza. We knew that Israel would not. As they say, you pays your money, you takes you chances, so I sent some money to Code Pink, bought a plane ticket and headed off to Cairo.

The first thing you notice after you get off the plane in Cairo is the smell. The whole thing smells like exhaust fumes. The second thing you notice is the police. The police are everywhere! There are little booths all over the place with “Tourism Police” in English written on them.

Tourism Police
In theory the Tourism Police are there to aid tourists, but as far as I can tell, their real function is to harass tourists and extract bribes from them. They do not speak English, they will let you into restricted areas or let you take photos only if you give them money. We found out later that they also can be called into service to separate foreign demonstrators from their local populace.

Welcome to Egypt
Code Pink organizers had been in Cairo for several weeks before we got there (on Dec. 26, the day after Christmas). They had secured rooms at a local college for all of us to gather, register, get information, log onto the Internet, meet with interest groups, etc. They had also contracted buses to take us into Gaza, and arranged for us to meet people in Gaza, and for places to stay and eat. In return for this, the government of Egypt had requested that we not meet with local Egyptian organizations. Since we were only going to be in Cairo a day before we went to Gaza, Code Pink agreed to this. This turned out to be a serious error.

After we got there, we found out (by e-mail) that the Egyptian government had canceled the arranged rooms, canceled the buses, and denied us permission to enter Gaza. As we now had nowhere to meet, we were told to gather in a large public square in downtown Cairo called Tariq square. This was the first of many meetings in Cairo.

The international groups planned several activities for the visiting people. We were going to go out on the Nile in boats and float candles to remember the dead. Nope said the government and canceled the rented boats. We were going to put notes on a large bridge about why we were there, but the police did not allow this to go on. We were disappointed that we were not allowed to go into Gaza, and in Egypt could not even get together with other people except in the very small restaurants.

We gathered in the small hotels in Cairo, that I swear, looked right out of “The Battle of Algiers.” Daily briefings had to be held simultaneously in three different hotel restaurants, and still, only a small percentage of the people could attend.

The Week Begins
The first day we were directed to a building called the United Nations building for meetings. The Egyptian government had no intention of allowing us to meet with anyone there. The building was actually an office building full of NGOs ( Non Governmental Organizations). Many of them seemed to be pretty good organizations, women’s groups, indigenous organizations, community development organizations. The police (hundreds and hundreds of them) blocked our entrance, then they formed a barricade between us and the sidewalk. Soon we were surrounded as largegreen trucks full of young men in full riot gear kept pulling up. They then brought metal gates that looked for all the world like cattle gates. We soon were introduced to what would become very familiar to us, the Cairo Corral.

The Cairo Corral
In order for the Egyptian police to do the Cairo Corral well, a couple of things are very necessary: No local Egyptians can be inside the corral, or be able to see or hear what the corralled foreigners are saying, and the people inside the corral must be denied the ability to come and go freely.

Sometimes we were allowed to leave if we didn’t come back, and sometimes everyone in the area who was not a local Egyptian was grabbed and thrown into the corral regardless if they wanted to be part of the protest or not. Sometimes people were kept in and not allowed to leave without their passports being looked at, and given a lecture about not “doing this” again in the future. I was never exactly clear what “doing this” entailed.

Hunger Strikers

Hedy Epstein, 84-year-old Holocaust survivor, on a hunger strike.

At this meeting I met Hedy Epstein, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who said she was going to hunger strike until she was allowed to march in Gaza. Before long other people joined her in the hunger strike. I was told there were over 40 by the end of the week.

I have always been impressed by hunger strikers. It seems to be a way of putting your life on the line that is completely nonviolent. Of course it only is effective if someone cares if you die, and the Egyptian government showed no signs of caring.

We Visit our Embassy
The next day it was suggested we all visit our embassies to ask them to assist us in getting into Gaza. The Spanish and French delegations were told that they were going to be allowed in because their governments had asked Egypt to let them in. This turned out not to be true, but at the time, we all believed it.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo is in a very secured area. You cannot get within two blocks of the embassy without going past Egyptian police checkpoints. We naively walked up to the checkpoint, showed them our U.S. passports and said we wanted to go to the embassy. We were told to wait, so we waited. After an hour and a half, a couple of women got impatient and said they had a right to go to their embassy and started to walk past the checkpoint. They were grabbed by the police, they sat down and started screaming. We ran around them to support them and yelled at the police to let them go. Someone unfolded a banner, and before you could say police state, those green trucks, those young men, those cattle gates, and we were in the Cairo Corral. This time we were not allowed to leave, to eat, to use the bathroom, to get any shade, to sit anywhere but on asphalt or dirt. The women who were being held on the ground were released into the corral, and we sat there for the next five and a half hours. A man who was later identified as working for U.S. Embassy security was present. I asked him if he worked for the U.S. Embassy (I asked everyone around who looked like they were in authority). He said he didn’t speak English. This was a lie.

There were some people who did call the embassy and after about five hours, we were told that we could visit our embassy. I still think it is outrageous that we were held like that, but the Embassy denied that they knew anything about it. We know they were told about it, and they did not run out and tell the Egyptians to set us free. No, to us it looked like we were been held with the full knowledge and approval of the Embassy, which would, of course, be a violation of our laws. I have been told by an aide of Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office that it will be looked into.

A Compromise?
Code Pink had a previously established relationship with the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Out of this connection came her offer to take 100 people from our group with her into Gaza as part of the Red Crescent (like the Red Cross), which she heads in Egypt. This offer was made very late at night and the list of the 100 people needed to be turned in the next morning. Code Pink worked through the night to come up with a list, attempting to balance the group by country, and to give priority to Palestinians from Gaza who wanted to visit their families.

Report from Gaza
When the people who did go to Gaza returned, we met (again in multiple rooms) to hear what they experienced. What we heard was disheartening and actually devastating.

We knew, of course, that Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, was problematic, and that knowledge was confirmed.

The march, at which the planning organization expected 50,000 people, was taken over by Hamas. Only men were allowed to march, and only government speakers and banners allowed. We were told that the Civil Society organizations had pulled out of the march and that only 500 people participated, all men except for a van with eight courageous women at the rear, that some of the people talked to.

The situation for women and children is dire. All of the women’s shelters in Gaza have been closed by Hamas. The incidence of domestic abuse, young forced marriage has greatly increased.

These people, who greatly value schooling, and used to have a near 100 percent literacy rate, now see schools closed, child labor on the rise and fewer and fewer people going on to college.

The refugee camps are woefully undersupplied. We were told of women raising children with just an empty tent. No mattresses or cots or clothing or food, just an empty tent, because that is all the relief agencies gave them that got through.
Hamas, we were told was corrupt, misogynist, fundamentalist and completely uncompromising.

The people in Gaza are stuck between this and the Israeli blockade. My heart goes out to them.

Conclusion
The blockade of the people of Gaza is maintained by their only two border countries, Israel and Egypt. That Israel and Egypt rank No. 1 and 2 in the amount of U.S. Government foreign aid they receive is certainly not a coincidence.

As we were there, Israel continued to build more settlements, even as Secretary of State Clinton asked them not to. What good is asking them not to, when we continue to fund them?

There was a group of South African activists who gave presentations on the anti-apartheid struggle in their country. This eventually resulted in a large group of people generating a document that is being called the Cairo Declaration. This document calls for an international campaign for boycott and divestment in Israel similar to the one that put pressure on the South African government in the 1980s. A plan for a world tour to generate support for this strategy is being developed. These people were very impressive.

We must find ways to bring alive to the Israeli, Egyptian and U.S. governments the suffering of the people in Gaza. Much of the world is sitting by and allowing this atrocity to continue.

If the South Africans can reconcile, if Northern Ireland can stop fighting with England, if we in the U.S. can elect Barak Obama president, I believe we can bring peace to the Middle East.