It was amazing: groups of foreign activists choosing to jet across the ocean and slam into the Cairene security forces (by now open collaborators in tending to Gaza’s prison wall). The Gaza Freedom March saw thousands of people exposing themselves to beating, bloodying, arrest … the physical force of state power. The last time this happened in such numbers was 70 years ago, when the Spanish Republic fought desperately against Franco’s military junta on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. And 70 years ago, too, the fascists received aid from imperial powers while the Republicans made do with immiserated or capricious allies.

In Cairo, Egypt, a year after Israel’s Cast Lead winter massacre – during which Israel slaughtered 1,400 Palestinians – 1,400 internationals came to Cairo. They came from the West, and they came from the global South. They flew across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Mediterranean basin. Even after the Egyptian government announced that the Gaza Freedom March didn’t have a chance of entering the Gaza Strip, they came from the world over. When Egypt’s authoritarian regime resorted to the manifold, abrasive, spirit-killers that permeate its security institutions and its bureaucracy, the participants of the Gaza Freedom March weren’t cowed. We did not listen.

We went to Egypt, with its security force of over a million, and demonstrated. French dissidents occupied the ground in front of their own embassy. Others were arrested or threatened with deportation. Others were beat in the streets. It was an atypical struggle. Not for domestic social reforms but for something else. It was a struggle for the freedom of 1.4 million Gazans ringed behind razor wire. A struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians, a ghettoized people facing one of the world’s strongest militaries on three of its frontiers and a massive militarized police state on its fourth.

The Gaza Freedom March should rightly blaze bright; its light won’t soon fade. International solidarity efforts are still waxing – the Palestine solidarity movement has mounted a series of stunning campaigns in reaction to the territorial fragmentation of Palestine. Flotillas of freedom ships continue to arrive from Cyprus. Viva Palestina moves over land and through sea, fighting off Egyptian riot police with stones and barricades.

The Gaza Freedom March took another route. Massive nonviolent civil disobedience targeting the core Arab partner in the blockade of Gaza: Mubarak’s dictatorship, which is now constructing a steel wall 30 meters deep in the dirt and sand between Egypt and Gaza. We inserted ourselves directly into that state’s security matrix, making front-page news across the Arab world in a series of increasingly spectacular direct actions, fighting a next-generation war – not a war of movement on Catalonian and Astourian battlefields but a media war. We fought for information, visibility, symbolic legitimacy, putting a claim on the world’s attention that couldn’t be ignored, that wasn’t ignored.

The tactical victory has also been pedagogical. No modern war has been truly fought simply within national borders, and the Palestinian fight for survival has been no different. So we’ve made it clear, if it wasn’t before, that if the stolen bankroll of the Empire stands behind Zionism, the world’s peoples stand behind Palestine.

But the vise tightens. High-visibility mobilizations like the Gaza Freedom March can’t be campaigns in a failed war, not when the struggle isn’t for democracy but against politicide, not when failure is so unimaginable. The Cairo Declaration against Israeli apartheid, drafted by core international organizers, brings those facts into stark relief, and enjoins the movements’ passive supporters – the world – to rise up. The moment is now.

The corporate media in the West have successfully manufactured the public belief that only the violence of non-state actors should be considered terrorism. It requires a great deal of mental discipline to deny the fact that any act perpetrated to instill terror can legitimately be considered terrorism. State terrorism is the use of military force and secret police tactics against domestic and foreign opponents of a state. State terror tactics have traditionally included outright invasions, air strikes, Special Forces operations, assassination programs, kidnappings, arbitrary imprisonments, extrajudicial killings, torture and the direct support of brutal regimes.

The Strategic Value of Maintaining Strife in the Middle East

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the US government has no interest in a genuine two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. The US government seems dedicated to supporting the normalization of permanent strife in the Middle East to justify their military and economic presence in the region. The established US record of supporting military dictators like Saddam Hussein and religious despots like the king of Saudi Arabia have consistently fostered discontent and resentment in the region. There is evidence reported in a January 2008 edition of the Ottawa Citizen indicating that the Muslim world does not hate the US for cultural reasons but instead deeply resents American interference in issues like the endless Palestinian/Israeli conflict. According to political scientists Peter Furia and Russell Lucas, “[we found] … no evidence that ordinary Arabs resent countries [the US] for what they are, and considerable evidence that they resent them for what they do.” This evidence contradicts George Bush’s facile claim that Muslims hate Western freedom so much that they feel obliged to destroy the secular world.

Occupation and the Continuing Erosion of Ever-Tenuous Palestinian Sovereignty

The seizure of Palestinian territory has traditionally been accomplished in intentionally stealthy increments. It started long before the creation of modern Israel following the annexation of Palestine in 1948. As Noam Chomsky describes in Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy: “Those familiar with the history of Zionism will recognize the method, dating back to the 1920s: ‘dunam [settlement] after dunam,’ arousing as little attention as possible.” The modern equivalent was expressed in the 1996 comments of then Israeli housing minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, when he described Israeli expansion into the West Bank: “I build quietly. My goal is to build and not encourage opposition to my efforts. What is important to me is to build, build, build and build some more.” The Israeli government, with full US support, has traditionally chosen this subtle and gradual path of seizing Palestinian lands and, perhaps more importantly, water resources. It continues to this day, generally with either US indifference or mild rebukes. This is the reality of what is euphemistically referred to as the peace process.

Peace is Possible

A two-state solution recognizing the mutual right to national self-determination is the only reasonable solution to the Palestinian/Israeli divide. Only the US government has the power and influence to generate this reality. Only the US has the military authority to ensure that established borders and agreements be respected. Only the US has sufficient influence over the United Nations to convince Israel to accept UN peacekeeping forces on its territory in a buffer zone between Israeli territory and Palestinian territory and to ensure a fair allocation of water and natural resources between Palestinian and Israeli.

Morgan Duchesney is a Canadian writer and martial arts instructor with an interest in social justice and international affairs. He has published work on the war in Afghanistan, Canadian democracy, the Canadian banking system and various martial arts topics. He holds an MA in Political Economy from Carleton University in Ottawa. Read the full text of this essay at honeybadgerpress.ca/articles.

Just Do It. Where’s the Beef? Yes We Can.