All of them! The Gazans and the Egyptian riot police underlings too!
The following account of the events in Mahalla has been circulating on listserves.
Intifada in Al Mahalla
A popular uprising has been taking place in Al Mahalla Al Kobra since April 6. Local residents, in the tens of thousands, took to the streets of this Nile Delta city in protest against price hikes, and in protest against the detention of more than 300 locals. With stone-throwing youth and Central Security Forces engaged in running street battles Al Mahalla has come to resemble the occupied Palestinian territories; and the protests in this city have come to resemble an intifada. Over 100 civilians and members of the security forces have been injured in clashes, and at least one civilian (a 15 year old boy) has been killed.
Hundreds of CSF trucks have been deployed around the city and hundreds more within it. Upon approaching the outskirts of Al Mahalla on the night of April 7 one could clearly notice that the security forces were facing stiff resistance on the streets – because tens of these CSF trucks, which were stationed around the city, had their windshields smashed-in (despite the protective metal grids covering them.) Tear gas stings the eyes and irritates the respiratory system upon entering the city itself.
In the neighbourhood of Sekket Tanta black clad riot police were firing tear gas canisters at just about anybody on the streets – including women, children, and the elderly; other troops opened fire on protestors using shotgun shells filled with rubber-coated pellets. Yet CSF troops could not disperse the youth protestors on the streets of this neighborhood. Male teenagers, along with (a significant number of unemployed) youths in their early twenties were at the forefront of these clashes with the CSF. Youth rained stones down upon the security forces and hurled Molotov cocktails at them. Clashes in this neighborhood had subsided only after 11pm.
These youths chanted very expressive slogans against Hosni Mubarak, the government, and the interior ministry. Other protestors had destroyed photos and portraits of the Egyptian president that were found on the streets.
Every single resident of Al Mahalla, with whom I spoke, confirmed that the non-violent demonstrations against price increases on April 6 had turned violent only after security forces moved to forcefully disperse demonstrators. Thus a peaceful demonstration quickly turned into a violent expression of popular discontent. Public properties and private enterprises have been the targets of attacks – a microbus was set ablaze, while three schools were torched, and two branches of the local ful & falafel franchise Al-Baghl were partially destroyed. It could've been local youth protestors who were behind these acts, or it could very well be the doing of destructive elements deployed by the interior ministry - in order to serve as a pretext for further crackdowns, and/or to tarnish the image of the protestors.
One youth protestor said "I don't know who set fire to the three schools, or why they did so? But I think I understand the motives behind the burning of the microbus and the attack on the Al-Baghl Restaurants. The microbus was a state-owned vehicle, and thus a natural target for attack. As for Al-Baghl, I believe the restaurants were attacked due to popular discontent with rising food prices – only five years ago a ful or falafel sandwich at Al-Baghl cost 35 piasters, it now costs 65 piasters per sandwich."
Another youth protestor on the street asked a member of the riot police "when's the last time you had a bite to eat? The officers aren't feeding you poor folks are they?" Looking exhausted and being unable to leave his spot, he quietly replied "we haven't had anything to eat in nearly 24 hours."
The word used for 'bread' in Egypt literally translates to 'life'. Fitting?
Go to the
3arabawy blog for more updates and pictures from Mahalla.
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I'd like to build off of Emily's excellent recent post "The Beginning of Legal Apartheid?" where she tackled the New York Times' weak attempts to address the structural racism in Israel/Palestine.
It wasn't important when Highway 443, a major access road to Jerusalem, became an Israeli-only road due to "security" concerns. It was only a case for "apartheid" when Israel was to create a "for-Palestinians" road as a solution, in lieu of just simply sharing the road.
Such strategic divisions of lived space are falling right in line with a "politics of verticality" outlined by Israeli architect, Eyal Weizman. That he has been all but banished from Israeli architecture circles and is now in the U.K. is, perhaps, more fortunate for us. His work is among the most critical of the implications such architecture has on Palestinian and Israeli lives. It describes how Israel's borders, for the first time in nation-state history, are becoming both vertical and horizontal as they tier the land into layers. He traces this perversion to at least since Camp David:
The border between Arab East and Jewish West Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical – giving the Palestinians sovereignty on top of [Temple] Mount while maintaining Israeli sovereignty below the surface, over the Wailing Wall and the airspace above the Mount. The horizontal border would have passed underneath the paving of the Haram al-Sharif. A few centimetres under the worshippers in the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, the Israeli underground could be dug up for remnants of the ancient Temple, believed to be “in the depth of the mount”.
Barak accepted the proposal in principle. To allow free access to the Muslim compound, now isolated in a three-dimensional sovereign wrap by Israel, he suggested “a bridge or a tunnel , through which whoever wants to pray in al-Aqsa could access the compound” . But the Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, rejected the plan flatly. They claimed, partly bemused, that “‘Haram al-Sharif … must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under and to the sides, geographically and topographically.”
Currently, we are witnessing more of this twisted logic coming into play as Israel continually seeks more control over the subterrainean (eg. aquifers) and sovereignty over air space (see: Gaza).
We've been hearing calls recently for a two-state solution from both the Palestinian and Zionist camps - quite the change of heart from recent decades. What a two-state "solution" would look like, in Weizman's own analysis, is not the removal of settlements from the West Bank at all. Instead, we will be asked to accept two states on top of, next to, and under each other, manifested through the 3-dimensional parsing of the area where settlements are connected to each other via highways and tunnels and Palestinian towns and villages connected to each other in similar ways -- ways that worm Israeli and Palestinian existence around each other.
Another key point Weizman points out in his phenomenal book "Hollow Land" is that while so much attention is being diverted over to Sharon's apartheid wall, we're missing the greater picture: the settlements themselves are borders -- the settlements along the River Jordan can be more usefully described as Israel's physical eastern border; the apartheid wall is only but the last line of defense in the case of a breach from the east. Coupled with Gershom Gorenberg's analysis in the Times article which asks that we think of Israeli-only roads as settlements, we can then take that up one level of abstraction and think of the roads themselves as borders as well.
The point of producing the landcape in this way is (1) so that Israelis and Palestinians don't ever have to see each other and (2) to create a self-maintained (re)production of difference and division at the level of everyday life, characteristic of the conflict itself, further extinguishing possibilities for a true and lasting peace among peoples forced to use the perverted tools of the nation-state to conceive of ways of living.
These logics, I'd like to point out, are not exclusive to the region. They can be found here in the U.S. and differ only in their degrees of the "spectacular". The growth of gated communities connected to shopping malls via bright and beautiful highways, juxtaposed against the further encroachment of poverty and increasing immobility of minorities in the ghettos is quite reminiscent. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have contributed a lot of fascinating analyses on this in "Splintering Urbanism" and many other pieces since then.
Is apartheid architecture contradictory to equal rights? For sure.
Is it contradictory to the means and end of modernity and the nation-state? Not at all. The production and maintenance of uneveness and inequality is exactly how the current paradigm thrives. To this very day, most in South Africa do not accept the fantasy that apartheid died the day Mandela walked away a free man.
That these racist roads mark, for the New York Times and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel it cites, the beginning of "legal" apartheid, implies that "legal" racism is the only racism worthy of an outcry; and thus, that the liberal state's framework of law suits and bureaucracy is the only formation we should accept as the final arbiter of right and wrong.
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