From Palestine to Tahrir Square

Another wave of anti-regime protests broke out in November of the same year in Alexandria, stronger than the one in February, turning the coastal city streets into a battle zone with the security forces. Army helicopters were called in, flying at low altitude to terrorize the students. Newspapers were quick to denounce the protesters as “Israeli agents.”

Those two waves of protests were among the primary factors that pushed Nasser to declare the “War of Attrition” against the Israeli occupation troops in Sinai. But they also marked the start of the “Third Wave of Egyptian Communism.”¹Phil Butland, “The Rise and Fall (and the Rise and Fall) of the Egyptian Left: Part 2,” The Left Berlin, June 3, 2023.  New dissident organizations began to coalesce and played a central role in the student rebellions of 1971 to 1973, which pressured Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, into launching a limited war to liberate parts of the Sinai Peninsula.

The war provided Sadat with some clout to temporarily pose as a national liberator, but soon the social question came to the forefront. In 1974, Sadat embarked on the regime’s first attempt at neoliberal transition, dubbed the “Open Door Policy” or Infitah. The following year, the labor movement began fighting back, with mass strikes in Helwan, Shubra, and Mahalla.

The strike wave and student protests continued to pave the road to the 1977 “Bread Intifada,” which saw a national strike and two days of street battles with the police across the country, triggered by austerity measures.²Hossam el-Hamalawy, “January 1977: Egypt’s Bread Uprising,” 3arabawy, December 8, 2020.  Sadat had to annul his neoliberal decrees and send in the army to put down the uprising.

Palestine was always present in the background as a revolutionizing factor. The March 1968 Karameh battle that saw the Fedayeen defeat an Israeli force on the east bank of the Jordan River provided a source of inspiration for the newly rising social movement in Egypt.

Student protesters drew comparisons between the heroic resistance of the Palestinians and the dismal performance of the conventional Egyptian and Arab armies in 1967. Such comparisons were regularly brought up in the following years as students took on Sadat, denouncing his procrastination to fight a war of liberation. The message was: if the Palestinians could do it, why not us too?

The social movement—which was born out of these events and caused the chain reaction that eventually led to the 1977 uprising—was spearheaded by alumni of left-wing student groups dubbed the “Supporters of the Palestinian Revolution Societies.” After crushing the uprising, Sadat rushed to hold a peace treaty with Israel, desperate for US support to maintain his regime. He was assassinated in 1981.³—, “6 October 1981: The Day the Dictator was Killed,” 3arabawy, October 6, 2011. Hardly anyone showed up for his funeral, and his assassins cited his treason and selling out the Palestinians as their main motive.⁴“Why Was Cairo Calm,” BBC, 1982.

From the First Intifada to the First Egyptian “War on Terror”

The defeat of the 1977 uprising was in effect the demise of the Third Communist Wave, though its official end is usually marked with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist block in 1991. The 1980s in Egypt were stagnant years, not just in relation to the economy, but also when it came to social struggles. Spontaneous outbursts of anti-regime protests occurred, mostly on university campuses, triggered by the Palestinian cause.

With the outbreak of the First Intifada, however, political dissent revived. Protests engulfed Egyptian campuses and the professional syndicates in solidarity with Palestinians, soon clashing with the regime’s security forces.⁵Revolutionary Socialists, https://revsoc.me/publications/20757/5-انتفاضة-1987-وتوابعها-في-المنطقة/.  These clashes generated anger and demands for democracy, the dismantling of the security apparatus, and the severing of ties with Israel, which had established a diplomatic mission in Giza walking distance from Cairo University.

The protests were so strong that Hosni Mubarak’s Minister of Information, Safwat el-Sharif, issued directives to the State TV to limit the coverage of Palestine-related news. The regime also used Yasser Arafat’s support of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to smear and demonize the Palestinians.

The US-led 1991 Gulf War and the ensuing Pax Americana dealt a crushing blow to the First Intifada and emboldened the US proxies in the region, including Mubarak. We cannot separate the containment of the First Intifada from the start of the Oslo Process and the empowerment of the local Arab regimes.

It is not a coincidence that Egypt’s first War on Terror was launched in 1992, in the same year that the regime embarked on its neoliberal transition under the sponsorship of the IMF and the World Bank. Though the declared goal was fighting an Islamist insurgency by the Gamaa Islamiya and the Islamic Jihad, the regime targeted all shades of dissent.

My undergraduate university years started in 1995, at the height of the counterinsurgency. Cairo was under police occupation around the clock—checkpoints, random searches, assassinations, mass arrests. Opposition political parties were under siege. Industrial actions plummeted. Professional syndicates were brought under state control. Dissidents were tried in kangaroo courts. And no one could whisper Mubarak’s name, either in a protest chant, a newspaper article, or a phone conversation.

How did we get from such a situation to an uprising that overthrew Mubarak and his family a decade later, in 2011? Once again, it was Palestine.

From the Second Intifada to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

The outbreak of the Second Intifada, on September 28, 2000, sent shockwaves through the region, including Egypt. Arabs saw their regimes either as helpless to stop Israel’s aggression or, more accurately, as complicit in the subjugation of the Palestinians. Through the rising satellite TV stations like Al Jazeera, millions of Egyptians watched live images of Israeli atrocities and of Palestinian children taking on tanks right in in their own homes.

People immediately began drawing parallels between the oppression of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli apartheid regime and the repression Egyptians were facing under Mubarak’s rule. They concluded that if those kids can take on the mighty Israeli army tanks, we can take on Mubarak’s armored police vehicles.

Mass solidarity protests broke out across Egyptian university campuses during the first week of October 2000. Even high school students and kindergarteners took to the streets waving Palestinian flags. The professional syndicates, which had been dormant in previous years, saw a revival of activism. But this resurgence of street politics was met with brute repression. The police cracked down on the protests and conducted mass arrests of student organizers. This was my first experience being detained and tortured by the State Security Police.

The protests died down temporarily, only to reignite in April 2002 as Ariel Sharon sent his tanks into the West Bank, leaving a trail of blood and carnage in Jenin and other cities. For two days, Egyptian students fought the police in running street battles in Giza, in what was dubbed the “Cairo University Intifada.” This was my first time hearing thousands chanting against Mubarak: “Hosni Mubarak is just like Sharon. He’s the same figure! He’s the same color!”

The protest wave was put down again by force, but something was already changing in the public mood. The wall of fear Mubarak had erected in the previous two decades was slowly crumbling. Activist organizations on campuses and beyond were also growing, linking the regional (Palestine and Iraq) to the local.

With the invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands took to the streets in the capital and the provinces, in what amounted to be the biggest protests witnessed by Egypt since the 1977 uprising. Again, two days of running battles with the security forces in downtown Cairo saw protesters burning Mubarak’s posters, tearing down banners of his ruling National Democratic Party, and fighting the riot troops with rocks just like the Palestinians. Tahrir Square was captured for two days, in what was to be a dress rehearsal for the uprising a decade later.

For three successive years, these mobilizations around Palestine and Iraq created for Egyptian activists a margin where they could organize and hold street actions that transgressed former redlines. It is no coincidence that the anti-Mubarak Kefaya (Arabic for “Enough”) movement launched on the heels of such mobilizations, in December 2004, by the same organizers who led the pro-Palestine and anti-Iraq war movements. The regional was becoming the local.⁶6. Hossam el-Hamalawy, “Kefaya’s First Anti-Mubarak Protest,” December 12, 2004, https://flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/albums/72157594373401893/.

Kefaya organized street actions, attracting students, middle class professionals and intellectuals, but hardly generating roots among the Egyptian working class. However, the movement adopted a conscious strategy of spreading the visuals of dissent, through the mainstream media and internet to the widest audience possible at the time, to instigate a domino effect.⁷ —, “In Pursuit of the Domino Effect,” 3arabawy, November 2, 2023.

Such visuals of dozens (and sometimes hundreds) chanting against Mubarak and burning his posters electrified the country. They destroyed Mubarak’s taboo on protest once and for all and were a message to the public that one could take on those in authority, whether in government or in the workplace.

It is in that context that three thousand female garment workers went on strike in Mahalla, in the heart of the Nile Delta, in December 2006, over economic demands. They encouraged their male colleagues to act, and soon the entire textile mill went on strike. Their victory after three days triggered the biggest and most sustained strike action witnessed in Egypt since 1946.⁸Joel Benin and Hossam el-Hamalawy, “Strikes in Egypt Spread from Center of Gravity,” Middle East Research and Information Project, May 9, 2007.

These strikes escalated into two provincial uprisings in 2008, in Mahalla and Borollos, where protesters brought down Mubarak’s posters.⁹Hossam el-Hamalawy, “April Mahalla Uprising,” 3arabawy, July 11, 2011; and “Kefr el-Sheik Citizens Fight Back Police,” 3arabawy, August 1, 2008.  The strikers quickly transcended the realm of economics into the political.¹⁰ —, “Taxi Drivers Demonstrate against Finance Minister,” 3arabawy, January 24, 2011.  Industrial organizers were also regularly taking part in Palestine solidarity actions.¹¹ —, “Egyptian Workers Honor Freedom Flotilla Martyrs,” 3arabawy, June 4, 2011.

This was the social movement that paved the way to the January 2011 uprising that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak. In Tahrir, Palestinian flags were present in almost every mobilization, while Israeli leaders mourned the loss of Mubarak and watched with fear how the Egyptian revolution unfolded. That same year, the Israeli embassy in Cairo was stormed twice by revolutionaries, who demanded the end of diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv.

The 2013 Counterrevolution

The military coup, led by then-Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, sought to put an end to the revolution and to any cause adopted by the revolutionaries. At the top of the list naturally came Palestine, the principal radicalizing factor for Egyptian youth. As Sisi embarked on his counterrevolutionary massacres in the second half of 2013, he also tightened the siege of Gaza, demonized Hamas in the media, and effectively collaborated with Israel in its 2014 war on Gaza.¹²—, “Rabaa Massacre: The Founding Social Contract of Sisi’s New Republic,” Middle East Eye, August 13, 2023; and “Why Sisi Fears Gaza,” The New Arab, November 13, 2014.

Tel Aviv met the news of Sisi’s coup with enthusiasm, struck close political and economic friendship with the new regime, and marketed Sisi in the US and the West as the only hope to save Egypt from “the terrorists.”¹³John Hudson, “Egypt’s New Rulers Have a New Friend in DC: The Israel Lobby,” Foreign Policy, August 19, 2013.  In return, Sisi allowed the Israeli air force to operate in Sinai, conducting hundreds of strikes against alleged terror targets.¹⁴Staff, “Israel Carrying out Secret Airstrike Campaign in Sinai to Help Egypt—Report,” Times of Israel, February 3, 2018.

Hamas, however, proved resilient, despite the Egyptian–Israeli siege. Facing heavy casualties in his counterinsurgency campaign in the Sinai Peninsula against ISIS, Sisi had to turn to Hamas by 2017 to help him police the border and to cut the flow of Gazan Salafis—who hate Hamas—into Egypt to take part in the insurgency against the Egyptian military.¹⁵Hossam el-Hamalawy, “The Egyptian Army’s Counterinsurgency: History, Past Operations, and the Sinai Campaign,” The Arab Reform Initiative, October 13, 2023.

Despite this rapprochement and the relative easing of the siege, the humanitarian situation remained dismal in Gaza. Sisi meanwhile tried to present himself as a credible mediator to newly elected US President Joe Biden—as capable of brokering truces or peace settlements between Israel and the Palestinians—in an attempt to regain some of Egypt’s lost regional clout.