Part 1: 1919 Revolution to Nasser

Part 2: Egypt’s 1968 and the aftermath

Part 3: The 1990s and early 2000s – Palestine provides a spark for the Egyptian Left

Part 4: The early 2000s – Rise in class struggle

Part 5: The Arab Spring in Egypt

UPDATE: I was honored to speak with the author of the study, in a Zoom meeting.

Above is Chapter IV of the MA Thesis I wrote 10 years ago, when studying at the American University in Cairo’s Political Science department. This chapter discusses the revival of the student movement following the 1967 defeat.

Of course reading it today I wish if I would have edited some parts, changed the lingo here and there, and added more resources and info I’ve been learning over the past years.

But in general I still think the thesis stands, and could help shed some light on this critical period in the history of the left in Egypt.

My mother, who took part in the 1971-2 student protests against Sadat, recalls how the Central Security Forces were beating them with sticks while denouncing the students as “Israeli agents.”

During the 18 day uprising, a young woman journalist appeared on TV “confessing” she was trained by the Mossad to foment those “riots” in Tahrir. And of course it turned out to be a big lie.

And now, the government has announced it caught another Israeli spy gathering information about the protests and fomented chaos with the intent “of harming political, economic and social interests and negatively impacting the course of the revolution”… and “prosecutors suspect he paid protesters to cause friction with the military and to foment Muslim-Christian tensions.”

Seriously what a soap opera.

By this latest case, the Mukhabarat is trying to pull together a cheap move, so that any public criticism against the military would be depicted immediately as the work of Israeli spies. More importantly, the Mukhabarat is trying to convince the public it’s a vital agency, in charge of protecting the country from any “foreign plots”, so as not to receive the same treatment as State Security Police.

The Mukhabrrat is hardly any different from SS. It’s been involved in renditions and torture, spying on Egyptians abroad, coordinating dirty operations with the CIA and Mossad. Do Israelis have spies in Egypt? Of course. And the biggest two spies are Mubarak and Omar Suleiman. One is enjoying a five star treatment in Sharm el-Sheikh, and the other seems to be getting away with his crimes, and possibly even run for presidency!

Dear Mukhabarat, stop treating us like children. Who the hell is this Israeli super agent who will single handedly go around fomenting protests, agitating against the army in the streets and mosques? Get a life, grow up.

24 February 1968: Cairo University students take to the streets, protesting the light sentences given to the Air Force generals blamed by Nasser for the 1967 defeat, and calling for political reforms, freedom of expression, the liberation of the universities from the control of the security services. The students, in the pic, are crossing a bridge, heading to the parliament.

The radicalization was to continue. In November, 1968, mass confrontations took place in the streets of Alexandria, between the Alexandria University students joined by the citizens vs the security forces.

It was in February 1968 that both the Egyptian student and the labor movements were revived with the outbreak of the first anti-Nasser demos since 1954.

Historians and ME scholars tend to trace the rise of Islamism as a mechanical reaction to the defeat of secular nationalist politics in 1967. But this is partially misleading and factually wrong coz the catastrophic defeat of Arab nationalism in 1967 led to a process of radicalization further to the left among a good number of those who looked up to Nasser as an agent of social change and liberation.

Someone like my father for example, who was a staunch Nasser supporter and a member of his Organization of Socialist Youth (the Nasserist regime youth group) was so SHOCKED by the defeat, but did not resort to the Quran in order to get out of his demoralization. He took down Nasser’s photo he had on the wall of his room, and put up Mao’s instead. And he wasn’t alone. 1968 witnessed the birth of the so called Third Communist Wave in Egypt.

I’ll try to put together a posting in the near future about that topic.

He will be remembered for many things, but for me, a story I read when I was a student will always pop out each time I hear his name mentioned:

In the 1968 Socialist Register he began his article, ‘The working class will neither unite politically nor man the barricades for a 10 percent rise in wages or 50,000 more council flats. In the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strike or armed insurrection in defence of their vital interests.’

Needless to say, few months later, the May 1968 events took place, with the biggest general strike in the history of modern Europe, including at least 10 million French workers occupying their factories, raising the red and black flags.

No one knows when the tide of events change, and revolutions most of the time take everyone by surprise, including the revolutionaries themselves.

It’s important however not to repeat the mistakes done before. It’s important not to re-invent the wheel each time a working class struggle breaks out.

It’s important we find a way to build an entity that unites the most militant sections of the workers in the industrial areas with the students in the universities, the professionals in their syndicates, and the peasants in their land that can take the fight forward.

Repression will always constitute an impediment, but it’s not impossible to overcome it, just like history showed us over and over again.