31 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Uncategorized
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 7 years to get that many views.
22 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Arab Revolution, Egyptian Revolution
Tags
Arab Revolution, Arab Spring, Constitution, Democracy, Egypt, Elections, Muhammad Morsi, Referendum
As the Arabic saying goes, Egypt is the mother of the world (مصر أم الدنيا), or, at least, it stands at the center of the Arab World. So, when people in Egypt struggle to find the right direction for the Arab Spring, we, in Palestine, like Arab everywhere, have the feeling that this is an important struggle about our fate.
After a fast start in the beginning of 2011, the big Arab Democratic Revolution, which is what the Arab Spring is, is making slow and hardly won progress in its numerous fronts. The last confrontations in Egypt put to hard test even an addicted optimist like me.
When president Morsi was elected I wrote a special post to welcome his elections. I called on all the forces of the Egyptian revolution to work together to dismantle the old order and build a new system that will serve the Egyptian people. After Morsi’s constitutional amendments that gave his decisions immunity from the Judiciary, Egypt looked more divided than ever.
And it was a division along the wrong lines. The left and the nationalists made a common front with the remnants of the old regime. On the other side the Moslem Brothers closed ranks with the Salafists. For a moment it looked like Egypt is on the verge of war about the place of Islam in society, leaving aside the central issues of the revolution of Democracy and Social Justice.
In this war, like in any war, the truth is always one of the first victims. So I must remind that the Egypt’s Judiciary is mostly controlled by remnants of the old regime. It was subversive to the military junta that put sticks in the wheels of the revolution (and the democratic transformation). It even dissolved the first elected parliament, creating the power vacuum that converted president Morsi into the single source of democratic legitimacy.
But was not the new powers taken by Morsi converting him into a new Dictator? Egyptians have all the rights to beware any type of a new strongman. The main idea of the revolution is not to transfer power from one ruler to another, but to keep the power in the hands of the people.
The power of the people doesn’t come without internal contradictions. It can’t be expressed only by elections and representatives. The real power stays with the people only as long as they are ready to fight for it.
The Egyptian people were fighting in the streets on both sides of the last confrontation. The final result was the sum of their collective efforts. On one side Morsi’s “power grab” prevented the Judiciary from blocking the writing of the new constitution and throwing Egypt back to lack of any legitimate system. On the other side the street protests forced Morsi to give up his extra powers. The result was that all agreed to take part in the referendum about the proposed constitution.
The second and last round of vote in the referendum about Egypt’s proposed constitution will be held tomorrow, Saturday, 22.12.2012. I don’t know what will be the results of this referendum, but I can already say that the winners in the referendum are the Egyptian people.
If the majority votes to accept the proposed constitution, Egypt will have its first democratic constitution, won by revolutionary struggle and approved by democratic vote. It will establish the free Egyptian people as the source of legitimacy. Any deficiency in the constitution should later be amended by the same Egyptian people.
On the other side, if the constitution will be rejected it will also mean that the Egyptian people are exercising their right to decide their fate. They will continue their struggle for a better constitution, government, economic order and society.
With all the harsh words and violent eruptions of the last period in Egypt, I would suggest that we all take some historic perspective by comparing Egypt’s revolution to its predecessors like France 1789-99, Russia 1917 and Iran 1979. Two years on into these revolutions there was a bloody struggle that will make our Egyptian conflict look like a friendly conversation.
Still we can hope much more from our leaderships than avoiding killing each other. There is a lot of work to do to achieve the goals of the revolution. There is no way to do it without constructive discussion and cooperation.
02 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted in ODS
Tags
Gaza 2012, Jaffa, Munich Conference, ODS, One State Solution, palestine, ROR, Yaffa
The invitation to the meeting was purposely limited, to allow more space for the development of discussion and in order to check to what extent activists from different tendencies and of different backgrounds can work together for the program of one democratic state in historic Palestine. 14 activists attended, coming from different parties, movements and organizations, Arab and Jews.
We discussed the previous efforts to work for one democratic state (ODS) in Palestine, including the two Haifa conferences (2008 and 2010) and the activists’ meeting in Munich in the summer of 2012. It was made clear that there is no ready-made movement that we can join, but we are part of a common effort to build a new movement that will unite all the supporters of ODS. We take part in the design of this new movement together with similar initiatives that already started in Bethlehem, Haifa, Ramallah and Gaza.
It was stressed that the ODS initiative proposes to establish a democratic state that will belong to all the residents of Palestine and all the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. This subject should be fully clear. Without this clear position, it is impossible to build trust between Arabs and Jews in the common struggle in the reality of occupation and Apartheid.
As all the participants are also active in other movements and organizations, and their experiences in these frameworks partially overlap with the proposed initiative, a significant part of the discussion was dedicated to these experiences. We paid special attention to the experience of some of the participants in building a movement for real democracy to everyone, following the social protests of 2011. They emphasized the success of this initiative to reach many different strata of the Jewish public.
We also discussed previous initiatives in support of the one state, as well as more general experiences of left movements and democratic organizations to operate within the Arab and the Jewish public. We discussed various estimates about what limited the success, or even caused the failure, of these attempts.
Many of the participants are active in organizations that promote the perspective of a secular democratic state.
Some of the participants expressed concern that without an emphasis on secularism we lose an important aspect of our criticism of Israel’s character, which is based on its definition as a Jewish state and its reliance on religion and religious coercion. Some also expressed apprehension that a new constitution, if it will not be secular, will not preserve human rights and especially women’s rights.
On the other hand, some participants argued that in the general public, Arabs and Jews, there is a strong religious influence, and that under the banner of secularism it will be harder to enlist support for a democratic solution to the pressing problems of occupation, racism and war. It was suggested that the democratic content of political secularism can be included and clarified through the definition of the democratic character of the proposed state. It was mentioned that in the Middle Eastern context, especially in light of the Arab Spring, secularism is sometimes associated with anti-democratic trends.
It was clarified that we are not building a new party or ideological movement. In this sense our ODS initiative is complementary and does not contradict the whole range of parties and movements that are active on the ground. The perspective of a single democratic state is designed to meet the lack of perspective for real, just and comprehensive solution, a solution that will put an end to ethnic cleansing, occupation, racism and endless wars.
This is an unprecedented attempt to establish a single democratic movement, working for an agreed political solution, in which all the inhabitants of the country and its refugees can take an active part.
The political base should be clear and propose a decisive change compared to the existing anti-democratic apartheid situation – but it allows all partners to retain their various positions on all social, economic and ideological issues. All these topics will be subject to discussion and political struggle within the democratic state when it will be established.
The participants expressed a desire to speed up the organizational stage so that we can soon go public and try to convince the wide audience about the desirability of one democratic state. To do this we need to have further discussions between us (and other activists) and try to agree on a common formulation of the primary things with which we will approach the public.
To focus the discussion, it was decided to discuss the Munich ODS declaration in the next meeting. We should conclude to what extent it can be used as the basis for our appeal to the public or should we formulate a different text.
It was agreed to hold another meeting in Jaffa on Tuesday, 20.11. Following the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip, which required focusing all efforts in the struggle to halt it, the next meeting was delayed to 4.12.2012.
You are invited to come and bring friends.
You can read this report also in Arabic or Hebrew.
Free Haifa 