Jadaliyya Co-Editors Demand that Egypt Immediately Release Alaa Abdel Fattah, Mohamed Al-Baqer, and Mohamed Ibrahim

Jadaliyya Co-Editors Demand that Egypt Immediately Release Alaa Abdel Fattah, Mohamed Al-Baqer, and Mohamed Ibrahim

Jadaliyya Co-Editors Demand that Egypt Immediately Release Alaa Abdel Fattah, Mohamed Al-Baqer, and Mohamed Ibrahim

By : Jadaliyya Co-Editors

[The following statement from the co-editors of Jadaliyya comes after the escalation of Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abdel Fattah's hunger strike to include a refusal to drink water, coinciding with the UN COP27 Climate Summit being hosted in Egypt. Jadaliyya's co-editors join the voices of many scholars, journalists, activists, and politicians in demanding the freedom of Alaa Abdel Fattah and all political prisoners in Egypt.]

The co-editors of Jadaliyya call on the Government of Egypt to immediately release author, blogger, software developer, and activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, who has languished in its prisons for almost a decade. Alaa has been on a hunger strike for over 220 days and a water strike for the past 4 days. He is currently at risk of dying in custody in Wadi El Natrun prison.

Alaa Abdel Fattah is a prominent activist and prolific writer whose most recent collection of political writings, entitled You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was published in April 2022, while the author was incarcerated, to widespread acclaim. That same month, Alaa started a partial hunger strike, with minimal calorie-intake. On 1 November, with his health already fragile, Alaa escalated his hunger strike. On November 6, the first day of the UN climate summit (COP27) currently under way in Egypt, he additionally stopped drinking water.

More than a decade ago, the Egyptian government repeatedly arrested Alaa on account of his activism related to human rights violations by Egyptian security forces, including the trial of civilians in military courts [See Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) press release for more information]. In 2015, an Egyptian court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment. Alaa was released in March 2019, only to be re-arrested six months later. He was held in pre-trial detention for two years before a court in December 2021 handed down a second sentence of five years’ imprisonment, this time on the charge of publishing false news shared in a Facebook post. His co-defendants, human rights lawyer Mohamed Al-Baqer and journalist Mohamed Ibrahim, were each sentenced to three years in prison. 

The Egyptian authorities have blatantly violated human rights laws as well as basic principles of due process, fair trial, and humane treatment. In arresting, detaining, prosecuting, convicting, and imprisoning Alaa, the Egyptian government has additionally violated its own laws and constitution by denying Alaa Abdel Fattah legal counsel, infringing on his ability to communicate with his family, and undermining his rights to access information, health care, and support from loved ones. Since his water strike began on 6 November 2022, there has been no communication from him or information regarding his health and well-being from any government authority. 

Since November 6 calls for Alaa Abdel Fattah's freedom have reverberated around the world. Among these, fifteen Nobel prize laureates have signed a letter calling attention to his plight and demanding his immediate release: “Alaa has spent the last 10 years-a quarter of his life-in prison, for words he has written,” the letter reads. “As Nobel laureates, we believe in the world-changing power of words – and the need to defend them if we are to build a more sustainable, genuinely fairer future.” 

As scholars, academics, writers, and activists working in and on the region, we are cognizant of the Egyptian government’s extensive, broad and ruthless attack against intellectuals and researchers in the country (MESA Committee on Academic Freedom Statement). Given the track record of the government in the detention and treatment of its critics, we are deeply concerned about Alaa Abdel Fattah’s well-being. We demand his immediate, unconditional release, as well as that of his co-defendants Mohamed Al-Baqer and Mohamed Ibrahim. While Alaa remains the most high profile political detainee in Egypt, his plight is shared by tens of thousands  of incarcerated persons in Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s prison system without a modicum of meaningful legal process. We therefore call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in Egypt.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412