For ‘international’ solidarity, you go ‘local’

I attended tonight a talk, at SF State University, by Palestinian journalist Ziyad Abbas and Michel Shehadeh, one the LA 8, on “Remembering the Revolutionaries of the Struggle: Palestinians Before the Nakba”, where the two spoke about the Palestinian resistance prior to the founding of the apartheid Zionist state in 1948.

The talk was interesting and refreshed my memory about what I read previously on the 1936 Palestinian general strike and the revolt that lasted for three years.

But I gotta say the part I liked the most was Ziyad’s response to a question from the floor about “What can American activists do to help the Palestinians?”

“Some activists who show up in my refugee camp (Deheisha), and ask me ‘what can we do to create solidarity with you?'” Ziayd said. “I tell them you have come a long way from America to here. I prefer you make solidarity with the Katrina victims in your country, create solidarity with the oppressed African Americans and Native Americans. If you win there, we win here. It’s the same struggle. It’s the same system.”

I absolutely loved this answer, and it is similar to what I usually write back to well-hearted readers who email me asking what they can do to help Egyptians in their struggle against the Mubarak’s Dictatorship. I write back asking them to spread the word about the abuses in Egypt among their circle of contacts and try to lobby Mubarak’s consulates abroad.

But in the end, the more effective approach for international solidarity is to go local. Get involved in what’s happening in your own neighborhood and country, and draw parallels and build bridges between your struggle and ours.

If you manage to bring about change in your own country, then this will be a victory for us in Egypt and elsewhere. And if we bring about change in Egypt and eliminate the dictatorship and replace it with a new system of governance based on direct (not the “liberal”-I-elect-once-every-five-years) democracy and equal distribution of wealth, then this will be a victory for the working class in America and elsewhere.

We are facing a global capitalist system of oppression, exploitation and genocide. The dictators ruling the world, from Cairo to DC are nothing but warring brothers.

If we manage to bring one down somewhere, this resonates by the domino effect elsewhere. We need to bring down the system globally. It will not happen at once. It has to start somewhere.. but from there we spread it to our neighboring countries.

And oh boy, I can just see what an overthrow of Mubarak can bring to this region. And I’m sure those in the White House can see it too. That’s why they’ll continue sponsoring Mubarak and his gangsters till the last moment, while talking bullshit about “democracy” every now and then.

If Cairo falls under a revolution, then expect the Arab capitals to go on fire too. Already the region is unstable, and the objective conditions for the spread of the coming Egyptian revolution are there.

Activists in the independent media in Egypt have to continue broadening their base as fast as they can in the coming period. The April Uprising, I can assure you, is just a bite of what’s to come. But when the national insurrection starts, we’ll need as many cameras and as many monitors in the streets to beam the images and the sounds out of the country to the rest of the world. This will inspire others into action and a quick replication of the events in our neighboring countries, which in my view are ripe for that.

So, Let’s visualize the revolution.