The road to Jerusalem passes through Mahalla

by hossam el-hamalawy

While the world’s attention was devoted to the uprising in Burma, workers at the biggest textile mill in the Middle East, located in Egypt’s Nile Delta, went on strike for a full week. 27,000 workers and their families, men, women, and children, took control of the state-owned Ghazl el-Mahalla textile company, demanding improvements in their work conditions, and the impeachment of the CEO and the corrupt, state-sponsored local union officials.

Hosni Mubarak’s regime mobilized thousands of police troops from five provinces, threatened to break the strike by force, and arrested at least five of the strike leaders. Defiantly the strikers remained in the factory, staging mass rallies with drums and whistles. The workers chanted: “We will not be ruled by the World Bank! We will not be ruled by Colonialism!” On the early morning of the seventh day of the strike, government negotiators succumbed to most of the strikers’ demands.

This is Mahalla’s second strike within the span of less than a year. The strike last year triggered the “Winter of Labor Discontent,” with the Cairo-based Workers’ Coordination Committee recording 386 industrial actions. Last year, according to the Cairo-based Land Center for Human Rights, 222 industrial actions took place. Mubarak’s henchmen are haunted by the thought of a widespread workers’ revolt.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners in the US and around the world should devote more attention to the social resistance in Palestine’s neighbors, where pro-US regimes have ruled with an iron fist to make sure the borders of Israel are “secure” and that the Palestinians are kept in line.

The Palestinians are struggling against the Israeli occupation. But this occupation is not alone. It is linked organically to a regional and international matrix of regimes and institutions, with all roads leading to Washington at the end of the day. The weakening of this matrix in one part can well spread to the other parts, bringing the entire matrix of control down.

Thus it comes as no surprise that Arab regimes would rush to ensure, with Israel, that the intifada was quelled as soon possible for fear of it spilling over to their own backyards; or Israel expressing concern whenever mass uprisings happen in any of its neighboring countries, for fear of the overthrow of a regime that acts as a safety valve for its security and the region’s “stability” and stagnation.

Many of the activists in Egypt who I personally know and who are involved in the labor movement are staunch supporters of the Palestinian struggle. It was through their involvement in solidarity with the second intifada that they came to the conclusion that the “road to Jerusalem, passes through Cairo,” as the slogan popularly chanted by Egyptian activists goes. The roots of the current coalition of anti-Mubarak activists, dubbed Kefaya (Arabic for “Enough”), can be traced to the Egyptian Popular Committee for the Solidarity with the Paletsinian Intifada, founded in 2000 to coordinate solidarity work with the Palestinian people. The movement metamorphosed in 2003 to the anti-Iraq war movement, which in turn produced Kefaya the following year.

While Palestinians engage against Zionism, the Arab masses are engaged in a fight against regimes which are tied to the Israeli state, or sponsored by its main backer, the US government. A strike wave like the one Egypt has been witnessing since December 2006 is bound to destabilize Mubarak’s regime if it develops further, and this can well have a great impact on the intifada, shaking the foundations of US hegemony in the region, with one of the latter’s main clients and the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel, Hosni Mubarak, overthrown in a process that could well be replicated in the region by the domino effect.

What can you as an activist in the United States do to support those struggling abroad?

1) Familiarize yourself with the social struggle in Egypt by regularly checking the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator at www.omraneya.net

2) Circulate information about industrial actions and human rights abuses to your network of contacts, activists, peers and family members

3) If you hear of a strike happening in an Egyptian factory, try to get solidarity statements from the institution you are affiliated with: labor union, student union, community association, human rights organization, political party

4) If you hear of police abuses against labor activists, write the Egyptian Embassy in Washington in protest. If possible, pull together a protest, no matter how small, in front of the Embassy or any of its consulates across the country.

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Hossam el-Hamalawy is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. He blogs at http://arabist.arabawy.net/.