The Gaza Freedom March and the Power of Taking Space
It was December 31, 2009, and the police in Cairo were on high alert. I got a call from a friend with a warning: The police had locked down the Lotus Hotel, near Tahrir Square, and were not allowing our people to leave. We were a block away, at another hotel. We had to move fast, so we quickly grabbed what we needed … food, water, phones, and don’t forget the flags! Our little ragtag band of women exited the hotel and hurried down the street, passing the ornate, tannish buildings of downtown Cairo and the many storefront shops and eateries, including a small restaurant I had frequented all week and the newsstand where I purchased my daily paper.
For the past week over thirteen hundred internationals had been showing our opposition to Israel’s military actions against the people of Palestine. We were, in fact, supposed to be in Palestine—in Gaza—for a Freedom March, but at the last minute the Egyptian government had denied our passage through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. So instead we stayed in Cairo, demonstrating at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, holding up signs at the UN offices, camping outside of embassies, and doing whatever disruptive actions we could to be seen and heard.
Egyptian laws under the then president Hosni Mubarak included extreme limits on the rights to protest, speak, and assemble, so our actions had become like a game of cat and mouse, with the police doing everything they could to stop us and keep us invisible to the people of Egypt. Undercover police in street clothes followed us as we traveled from site to site, darting between cars, occupying public spaces, refusing to be cowed. And now, for New Year’s Eve, we decided to gather in as visible a place as possible, where the police might feel restrained from brutality. The Egyptian Museum, a block from Tahrir Square, seemed ideal.
We passed the Mogamma, a huge government building across the street from Tahrir Square. The “square” is not really a square, but a giant traffic circle with seven roads leading in and out, ringing a circular park of grass. It was hard for me to imagine people actually using Tahrir’s park when you had to cross through traffic to get there, but then again crossing any street in Cairo feels like you’re taking your life into your hands. As we neared the entrance to the Egyptian Museum, I spotted a group of police, some with gold visors on their hats and shoulder ribbons to denote a high rank, some with berets, some wearing suits, others in street clothes. That was okay—we could improvise. They knew we were here, but not what we intended to do. We held the element of surprise.
I recognized people from our group gathering on both sides of the street, looking, observing, waiting. As our small group made our way toward the museum entrance, the police immediately came toward us—so we quickly bolted into the street, taking our homemade flags and signs out of bags, purses, and backpacks, yelling, “Free, Free Gaza!” Within moments hundreds of us were in the street, veering in unison like a flock of birds. We held our black-and-white signs high. Our message, FREE GAZA, could be seen everywhere in both English and Arabic.
Tahrir was straight ahead. Would we, could we, actually take the square?
I looked back toward the Egyptian Museum and saw the police to our right in hot pursuit. But there were about a thousand of us flooding into the streets now, chanting and surging forward. We veered into oncoming traffic. Up ahead, police in riot gear, with padded vests and helmets, ran toward us, trying to cut us off. To our left was the sidewalk, bordered by the signature green fences of downtown Cairo. We had nowhere to go, so many of us near the front decided to sit down in the street. Farther down the block, a large group of French demonstrators in their bright green shirts were also sitting. One of them was on a bullhorn, leading a chant, “Viva, Viva Palestina!”
The next thing I knew, undercover police were violently grabbing people, pulling them out by the hair, punching them, making arrests. The crowd roared “No!” at every punch. I saw them try to grab the French guy on the bullhorn—and then they came for me. Shit! I went limp as they grabbed me and I became the object of a tug-of-war, with the police pulling me in one direction and my friends pulling me in another. Starhawk and others threw their bodies on top of me, a tactic called puppy piling, just a bunch of soft, limp bodies trying to protect me. The police pulled almost everyone off, but Olivia Zemor, a powerful French organizer, was still holding on! It was quite a scene. The police finally succeeded in throwing me over the barricade and into a pen they had constructed on the sidewalk.
I knew that what these officers really feared was not us, but the Egyptians who had gathered on the sidewalks nearby to watch the spectacle. The weeklong effort to keep us invisible to the public was failing, and the day had only just begun.
Locked Out, Locked In: The Struggle for Palestinian Liberation
I first became conscious of the Palestinian struggle in the 1980s, when I was co-coordinator, along with Mark Anderson, at the Washington Peace Center in DC. When the First Intifada broke out in 1987, a global peace movement rose up, and in DC we organized, protested, and raised our voices.1 My connection to the Palestinian struggle has continued over the years, one of the many threads in my life. In 2001 my trainers collective helped develop the training protocols for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which is a Palestinian-led, internationally supported, nonviolent movement in support of the Palestinian people against the ongoing occupation by the Israeli military.
In July 2002 a group of us from the Pagan Cluster, in coordination with work that ISM was doing in the West Bank, traveled to Palestine. Our trip included an ISM training in Jerusalem; from there we went to Jenin, a northern Palestinian city in the West Bank. As remains true today, the West Bank was divided into areas with different degrees of Palestinian and Israeli control. Life under military occupation was a daily assault, and intermittent skirmishes and battles sometimes became protracted periods of conflict. A few months before our arrival, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (aka the Israeli Occupation Forces, IOF) had attacked six Palestinian cities during Operation Defense Shield, a major military offensive launched after numerous Palestinian suicide bombings in March 2002.
Jenin was a city where the Palestinian resistance was strong. The IDF cut off water and electricity before entering the town, then attacked with infantry, tanks, bulldozers, and helicopters before moving on to the Jenin refugee camp, destroying it with a dozen armored bulldozers, razing 450 homes in the process. When the battle ended, the IDF would not let medical and humanitarian teams in for several days, leading to rumors that bodies were removed to hide the truth of how many Palestinians had been killed. Human Rights Watch eventually estimated that at least fifty-two were killed, and the IDF reported that twenty-three Israeli soldiers had died.2
Upon our arrival to the area in July, we were oriented by local Palestinian leaders, who made clear there was a war going on and they didn’t want us in the way. They said, “If you see us pulling kids into an alley, go with them. We cannot guarantee your safety if you’re out in the streets.” Jenin was in a state of partial recovery and being heavily monitored by the IDF. The signs of war were everywhere: half-destroyed buildings riddled with bullet holes, Israeli tanks driving through the streets, and Apache Blackhawk helicopters overhead. Moving outside the town’s main drag of concrete beige buildings, you would find sandy dirt roads where dust rose up with the slightest breeze.
The role of ISM volunteers is to witness, accompany, and be a visible presence when the Israelis show up as a way to deter them from attacking. During my time in Jenin, I observed the many ways war is waged, not just with bullets and bombs but with psychological control. If the Israelis said this was a day for stores to be open and the Palestinians left them closed, the IDF would come in, break the locks, and open the doors. When the sounds of approaching tanks got louder, the makeshift tea stands on the streets quickly disappeared, pulled into alleys, only to reappear when the tanks passed. I learned about the humiliating, terrifying checkpoints within the West Bank that take hours of time to get through while standing in the sun, looking at barbed wire–topped fence walls. I learned how war becomes normalized and how to live in 126-degree heat with tanks on the ground just outside the window. I learned what it felt like to travel from an illegal Israeli settlement built on Palestinian land in the West Bank with pristine homes, manicured lawns, and trash cans lining the sidewalks to the bombed-out Palestinian neighborhoods on the other side of the fence.3
Life in Palestine is extremely hard and dangerous. I have witnessed the struggle for thirty years, and in that time more Palestinian land has been lost through occupation, illegal Israeli settlements, and apartheid walls erected between Israeli and Palestinian areas on Palestinian land. The children of Palestine don’t remember a time of peace—and cannot be told about it by their parents, who don’t remember a time of peace, either. Today much of the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority while Gaza has been governed by Hamas since 2007, but both areas remain under IDF control. The Gaza Strip, a twenty-two-mile stretch of land along the Mediterranean Sea with almost two million people, is known as the world’s largest prison because the people are not free to come and go, nor to import or export goods. Israel controls the borders to the north and east. The sea serves as the border to the west (though Israel controls the waters), and Egypt controls access to the Rafah border crossing in the south.
Oppressed people find different paths for their resistance—political, legal, nonviolent action, or armed opposition. Gaza has been a home of intense resistance to the Israeli occupation, including a lopsided military battle between small homemade rockets and US-made aircraft missiles, bombs, and concussion grenades.4 It is always important to make a distinction between the people of any country and the policies of their government. Many Israelis don’t support the occupation, and many Palestinians disagree with the violence supported by some of their leaders, instead advocating for nonviolent resistance while trying to live their lives with dignity, freedom, and peace.
In December 2008 the conflict between Israel and Palestine exploded when the Israeli government began a three-week military offensive on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. About fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians. In the months afterward in Gaza, electricity was down, hospitals were destroyed, and fishermen were shot and killed in their own legal waters. With no legal way in or out, tunnels had become a lifeline for desperately needed resources in Gaza, but now those tunnels were under attack and many were destroyed.
In early 2009, at the initiative of the Palestinians, the International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza was formed, and Code Pink—a US-based, women-led peace group started in 2002 in response to the war in Iraq—led delegations to Gaza, bringing hundreds of internationals to witness the destruction and commit to organizing when they returned home. It was during one of those visits that the idea of an international march in Gaza to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead took root. Eventually forty-two countries became involved, each organizing local campaigns and preparing people to come to Cairo and then on to Gaza in December 2009.5
Ships to Gaza
During the summer of 2010, the first big international Freedom Flotilla sailed to break the siege of Gaza. It was filled with activists and humanitarian aid workers, and the IDF attacked, killing nine people on the Turkish ship the Mavi Mamara. This fueled great global outrage, and friends of mine in the US decided it was time to step up our resistance. We organized the first US Boat to Gaza, called the Audacity of Hope, which attempted to sail from Greece in the summer of 2011. Our boat was sabotaged and our mission thwarted by the Greek government, which caved to the US and Israeli pressure. (Greece was facing a severe economic crisis at the time, and their own uprising was in progress in the form of a massive popular occupation in Syntagma Square outside the Hellenic Parliament building. I participated in that occupation and was awed by the organization and fierce resistance of the people.) Since that flotilla, I have been the nonviolence trainer and ground crew for the Women’s Boat to Gaza in 2016 and the international Freedom Flotilla in 2018.
Cairo and the Power of Being Visible
During the planning phases for the Cairo trip, I was crazy busy as usual with my peace efforts and organizing in the emerging climate movement. I was also working on mobilizations against the big banks that became part of ongoing efforts ultimately leading to Occupy Wall Street—but that is a story for another chapter! Somewhere amid this hectic fall of 2009, I was in touch with friends, including my dear friends Ann Wright, Starhawk, and Laurie Arbeiter, about the Gaza Freedom March.
I had befriended both Ann and Laurie during our time organizing at Camp Casey in Texas in 2005. Ann is a widely respected organizer who in her previous life was a colonel in the US Army and a diplomat with the State Department. She resigned to protest George Bush’s Global War on Terror. Laurie is an artist with the We Will Not Be Silent Project, named after the words of a group of student activists called the White Rose during Nazi Germany, all of whom were eventually killed. Laurie’s black-and-white signs and T-shirts carrying powerful messages have been seen at protests all over the world, and I was not surprised that she was bringing them to Gaza. I was already planning to be in Europe in December for the Climate Summit in Copenhagen, so I decided to stay on and meet my friends in Cairo.
The original plan was for all 1,350 people to board buses in Cairo on Monday, December 27, travel to Gaza, and meet with Gazan community organizations and leaders before a mass march with Palestinians and international allies on December 31. Despite months of planning and coordination among solidarity organizations, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, and various ministries in Gaza, ultimately the government of Egypt—which was beholden to US and Israeli interests—understood that a mass march in Gaza might tip international public opinion further in support of the Palestinian cause. They decided to shut the whole thing down.6
I flew into Cairo on Sunday, December 26, with my partner, Juniper, and her daughter. During the taxi ride to the hotel, I was amazed at the busyness of Cairo, a massive city of twenty-five million with people and cars going every which way. I saw the minarets of mosques dotting the skyline, almost all of them with dome-shaped roofs. We traveled down huge roads with traffic moving in all directions. The horns were nonstop as people darted between cars. As the taxi came closer to our hotel, the traffic was moving more slowly and I caught glimpses of markets down the smaller side streets. The weather was warm that day, almost seventy degrees, and our windows were wide open. I could not wait to walk around those markets myself.
Our hotel was a small building set back on a side street. The room was simple, with four single beds, a large window with red drapes, and a ceiling fan that creaked as it whirled above. Another hotel, the Lotus, was about fifteen minutes from us, closer to Tahrir Square and where the core march organizers were staying. After exploring our neighborhood, we headed over to the Lotus, where we immediately encountered intense activity and organizing. People were working on small tables at the restaurant, preparing little cards with pink ribbons that we would tie on the busy Kasr al-Nil Bridge, one of the main thoroughfares with eight lanes of traffic over the Nile River, the next day.
We had heard that the Egyptian government revoked their decision to allow us into Gaza, but now my good friend Ann told me they also canceled our large meeting space at the Jesuit College. We were now 1,350 experienced and motivated international activists with nowhere to go. As you might imagine given the members of this particular crowd, this was not the end but rather the beginning of some amazing, creative plans.
The next day, Monday, was the one-year anniversary of the first day of Operation Cast Lead, a reminder to us all about why we were here. That morning, after waking to the sounds of early-morning prayers, I grabbed a quick breakfast of bread, cheese, and fruit, then headed to the Lotus for a meeting. The hotel was packed, every room and hallway full. We committed to keep pressure on the Egyptian government to reverse their decision and discussed plans to organize delegations to our embassies. But first, our street action. We walked together to the Kasr al-Nil Bridge and were silent as we tied the messages in commemoration of the Palestinians who had died in Israel’s attack. Before long, police arrived to flush us off the bridge, ripping the cards off as they demanded we leave.
Back at the Lotus we learned that the government had now canceled our reservations to hold a candlelight vigil on the famous felucca sailboats on the Nile. Damn! We went to the boat docks anyway with fourteen hundred candles, one for each person killed during Cast Lead. When we arrived at the docks, the police had blockaded the entrance and created a gauntlet on the sidewalk along a busy road. As our numbers grew, they set up barricades across the sidewalk, packing us into a small area, hoping to limit the footprint of our presence. I could hardly move. The crowd erupted, chanting, “Let Us Go to Gaza, Let Us Go!” To the dismay of the police, we were able to pass and light our candles up and down our cramped line on the sidewalk, creating a beautiful glow.
It was dark now, but the city was still teeming. In fact, it never stopped. When you have twenty-five million people, there is always someone on the move! We headed over to the Mogamma and milled about as our people arrived. This was a flash meeting, which meant we first gathered in less conspicuous small groups; when it seemed like a critical mass was achieved, we swarmed together as a big group. This was the perfect tactic for Cairo, with its many laws against public assemblies.
At the meeting we discussed our overall plans for our week in Cairo. It was already clear that the Egyptians had a simple strategy—shut us down and keep us invisible. The Mubarak regime was a police state and there was a law limiting public gatherings of more than five people, as well as a so-called state of emergency that had been ongoing for twenty-nine years. The Egyptian government did not want the desire and passion of the Egyptian people for freedom to ignite the powder keg that indeed exploded two years later.
Under these circumstances we had to be creative. Their strategy was to keep us unseen, and our strategy was to be as visible and disruptive as possible.
Early on Tuesday morning I headed over to the French Embassy, where the French delegation had gone to negotiate with their ambassador, who had promised buses for the trip to Gaza, but then reneged. Being the fierce activists they are, the French did not leave, but lay down in the street in front of the embassy for many hours, blocking traffic, then set up an ongoing occupation on the sidewalk outside their embassy. One side of the street was now lined with green military trucks, the other with a wall of police in riot gear. The police line extended all the way down the block, making it impossible for passersby to see what was going on.
After speaking with someone about an action later that day at the UN offices, I headed back to the Lotus, where I was told that a group was being detained at the US Embassy. I am a fast walker and bolted right over.
I walked by the embassy first to assess. Just inside the gates I saw about thirty people standing in a group with police all around them. I then held back about twenty feet from the entrance to watch. Near me on the sidewalk I recognized a few others who, like me, were trying to figure out what was going on. We were clustered together, talking, when a group of police walked up and asked if we were American. We said yes. They said we had to go inside the embassy with the others. We said no. They surrounded us and started walking us toward the compound. Damn! They were using a tactic I knew well—when I want to move someone threatening away from our group, we surround them and walk them out.
I did not want to be inside the compound. It’s the same in any country: Law enforcement does their worst deeds outside the public eye. I quickly said to our group, “Are you willing to sit down?” They all said yes. The moment we reached the barricades lining the embassy’s drive, we sat down in a circle and linked our arms. The police had no idea what to do—this was not in their playbook. They brought over more police to surround our circle, which frankly was at odds with their overall strategy of keeping us invisible. As we sat we decided to make a few signs that said FREE GAZA in English to hold up to the passing cars. The one man in our group spoke Arabic, so he made a sign that passersby could actually read.
When the police realized what was going on, a couple of cops came over and roughly grabbed the Arabic-speaking man, literally throwing him over the barricade. After things calmed down, we all stood up and held our signs high above the heads of the police, chanting “Free, Free Gaza!” The police tried to use their bodies to block us from view, but otherwise did not get aggressive, I believe because we were all white women, privileged also by our US passports. After another hour or so, they released us, as well as the people inside. We scurried away, knowing we had yet another action within the hour at the United Nations office. Our efforts to negotiate passage to Gaza failed there, as did my attempt to organize a spokes council. While we had a great first meeting, some of the key organizers were not going to relinquish control.
By Wednesday, the tension in Cairo was high. The government was losing ground in its efforts to keep us quiet and unseen. The local papers carried stories about us with big color photos on the front page, including members of our group who scaled the Pyramids, unfurling a giant Palestinian flag three days in a row. The presidential palace was surrounded by military vehicles. Egyptian activists were calling for a protest at the Journalists Syndicate. This is precisely what Mubarak’s government wanted to avoid—the inclusion of the Egyptians.
Hedy Epstein and my good friend Jen Hobbs on hunger strike on the steps of the Journalists Syndicate in Cairo. Courtesy of Angela Sevin.
That afternoon I was sitting on the steps at the Journalists Syndicate with a group of activists who had begun a hunger strike at the instigation of Hedy Epstein, an eighty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor. Soon the Egyptian activists showed up. While there had been prior communication between us and them, we had been very concerned about putting them at risk. This protest, however, was theirs, and I had the sense we were giving them protection by occupying the public space alongside them. Speaker after speaker got on the bullhorn, some speaking in English, others in Arabic.
Word was spreading through the crowd that Jodie Evans, one of Code Pink’s co-founders, had negotiated with Suzanne Mubarak, the president’s wife, who then negotiated with President Mubarak to allow two buses into Gaza. Many of the international organizers were shocked to learn this. Code Pink was the primary administrative anchor and initiator of the Gaza Freedom March, but delegations from the participant countries had their own processes within the larger framework and expected to be included in big decisions like this one.
Code Pink is an organization of predominantly white women with a lot of resources and privilege, which is part of why they were so effective in organizing the march. Earlier in the year, they had reached out to Suzanne Mubarak, receiving permission for their earlier delegations to bring humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing. Now negotiations with her were happening again, but this time none of us knew about it. Some were excited; others were pissed, particularly the South African delegation. Code Pink worked to ensure that each country would have people on the bus, but amid the uproar, many countries refused to send a representative.
The fissures in our coalition deepened when the Egyptian foreign minister—angry at Suzanne Mubarak for undermining his decision to prevent any of us from entering Gaza—began a public propaganda campaign claiming that only the “good” people were being allowed into Gaza, while the hooligans and troublemakers were staying behind. A list was being created by Code Pink and vetted by the government. Ultimately only about 100 people, out of the 1,350 of us, were on the list.7
Anger can be destructive, but it can also become a creative force. That night we held a big coalition meeting at the Lotus Hotel to figure out what to do. I’m not sure how I got the facilitation card for this meeting, but it was not pretty. Emotions were high. The buses arranged by Code Pink were not negotiable, and they would leave the next morning. The South Africans reasserted the call for a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) strategy toward Israel and proposed we create a declaration in support of it.8 We achieved consensus, and many of us signed a document—still in effect today—that increased international unity and commitment to the BDS strategy.9
OUT OF THE TOOLBOX
Tactics That Take Space
Taking space disrupts business as usual and catches the attention of those nearby. It sends our message powerfully, in words and in actions.
HUMAN BILLBOARDS. I love what I call human billboards! These are big signs that two or more people hold up at intersections or in front of doors. They are incredibly effective at getting people’s attention and even motivating them to take action if you amplify the massage by adding a hashtag. They are one of the most effective visibility actions because they pair a human face with the message on the billboard.
DELEGATIONS are a great tactic that allow people to enter the space of power and engage with the actual decision maker or their minions. If the decision maker won’t engage, they for sure will know you were there! It’s good to have something to leave behind, like a notice, memo, petition, or letter. If they threaten to call the police, you can say, “Please do! There is criminal activity by your office!” You can leave before or when the police arrive. This is a great tactic in banks, politicians’ offices, corporate offices, and embassies.
OCCUPATIONS are a very old tactic where people who are fighting for a cause take land or space and occupy it. The tactic itself requires additional layers of planning and preparation: If you want to take something for the long haul, you have to be prepared with food, water, sanitation, and protection from the elements as well as the police.
STRIKES are one of the ultimate direct-action tactics, and you know they are powerful because we see the lengths people in power go to stop them! Strikes are clear acts of non-cooperation as people withdraw participation from the machine that oppresses them. They often use picket lines to block access. General strikes have been extremely effective at creating a crisis, and we could sure use more of them today.
PICKETS are a great tactic for almost any action in front of buildings or entrances. Pickets are very visible and a powerful way to take space near doorways. They can also make it hard to enter the building or establishment. Whether they are silent, chanting, or bursting with song, a strong picket can really shake things up.
TAKING INTERSECTIONS. I have spent a lot of my life in intersections, not just walking through to get here or there, but sitting in, dancing in, and occupying them. At a tactical level, taking intersections can be complex and might involve planning for teams, timing, points of entry, the tactic itself, support with attention to safety, getting your message out, and legal/jail support if there are arrests. It can also be as simple as walking out into the street as a group and blocking traffic by sitting, standing, or holding a banner.
BLOCKING BRIDGES AND HIGHWAYS is a powerful yet dangerous tactic. You need to make sure you have enough people and good signage or flyers to pass out so that people understand the plan. Using props that are hard to move can help, as can designated drivers that stop in front of you. If you don’t intend arrest, you need an exit strategy. I’ve learned that blocking exit ramps can be a safer way to block a freeway with less risk and equal impact.
(Almost) Taking Tahrir Square and the Power of Occupying Space
The next morning I made the rare decision to sleep in. My name was on the list of internationals allowed into Gaza, but I decided not to go. The trip was dividing us, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. Still, I was glad that our humanitarian aid would make it in.
I was woken by the phone in my hotel room. It was a friend saying, Lisa, you need to come to the buses, it’s getting ugly over here. Ugh. I pulled on some clothes and quickly walked over, hoofing past the Journalists Syndicate on the way, where a few Egyptian protestors remained from the action the night before. I turned the corner and saw two buses parked along the curb on 26 of July Street in downtown Cairo. I also saw that the police had placed large barricades on the sidewalk, dividing our group into two sections—those with their luggage waiting to board the buses, and the section of people taunting those waiting to board. The crowd was chanting, “All or None, All or None!” and “Get Off the Bus!” The Egyptian police stood at the perimeters, watching the success of their divide-and-conquer strategy.10
It was painful to see members of our group yelling at others not to go. The next thing I knew, about a dozen people got off the bus, and the crowd cheered. One of these people was a Palestinian woman with tears streaming down her face.
Ann asked if I could help bring some calm. I waded into the crowd, feeling uncertain. There were people from all the country delegations—I saw shirts about Gaza in Spanish, Italian, French, German, English, and more, and multilingual banners hanging off the barricades facing the street. I clapped and called out, “Friends, let’s come together. Circle up!”
Slowly a circle formed and focus shifted from the buses to our gathered group. The Palestinian woman who got off the bus sat in the center. I asked if she wanted to speak. Through her tears, she told us this was the only way she had to see her family, but she didn’t agree with only a select few going. She felt that staying in solidarity with the international coalition was important.
One by one, others spoke out in pain about the devastation in Gaza and their disappointment at not being able to go. We started to sing together, again shifting the energy from anger to love and solidarity. After a while I asked everyone if they were willing to leave and head back to the hotel for a meeting. There was work to be done. Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, and though we had expected to be in Gaza marching fifty thousand strong, instead we would march for Gaza in Cairo.
And so it happened that the next day, a thousand of us flooded into the street bordering Tahrir Square, surrounded by police who had spent an exhausting week trying to outmaneuver us. Despite the government’s best moves, here we were in a very public, very visible street, the police resorting to outright violence to keep us away.
After the police attacked the crowd and put me and others into a penned-in area on the sidewalk, the scene quieted down. My ribs were hurting and I felt roughed up, but on the whole I thought I would be okay. There were hundreds of us in the sidewalk pen secured at each end by a wall of riot police, who served the dual purpose of keeping us in and hiding us from the eyes of passersby. There was nowhere to go, so just as we had done at the United Nations and Journalists Syndicate, we hung our banners, raised our signs, and began chanting. Some of our people on the outside of the pen were able to hand us food. Later we gathered to talk strategy, deciding to occupy the location until midnight. It was New Year’s Eve, and we knew we would get media attention around the world.
But as the hours passed, so did the will to stay. An idea of regrouping at midnight at the Mogamma was taking hold, but I was, like No, let’s stay here!
I was very upset. Every time we committed to occupy, the political will quickly dissolved. The same thing had happened the day before outside the UN. How could we create a crisis if we kept giving up space? A few others stayed with me, including Ken Mayers, a thoughtful and gentle man from Veterans for Peace who understood my disappointment. But there was nothing we could do. We did not have the numbers to make any real impact, so we left, too, carrying sadness in our hearts.
We went back to our hotel, and after some food we prepared for the New Year’s Eve midnight convergence at the Mogamma. We arrived early with candles to spell out FREE GAZA. As we lit the candles, many Egyptians joined in. Once again, the plainclothes police moved in, forcing the Egyptians to leave. It seemed like the police were everywhere in Cairo, following us, talking to us, tracking our every move. It just was what it was.
During the walk back to our hotel, my phone rang. It was a friend from the hotel saying, “Lisa, don’t come back, the secret police have been here twice looking for you.” I was, like Okay, shit. I was exhausted and in pain and wanted nothing but my bed. Instead, we made our way to a different hotel, where I arranged to sleep in a friend’s room.
The following evening Juniper packed up all of our stuff, took a cab, got out a few blocks from where I was staying, then walked over to get me. We had tickets for the night train to Luxor. We loaded up our taxi and the driver said, “Twenty geneih.” I said, “What? It’s usually five.” Star turned around from the front seat and said, “Lisa, when fleeing the secret police, do not haggle with the taxi driver.”
Right! Twenty geneih it was.
Every uprising has many roots, and I was awed when a little over a year after we took these actions in Cairo, the Egyptian people took Tahrir Square. Many Egyptian activists had been unhappy that the Gaza Freedom March negotiated with Suzanne Mubarak, feeling it gave the Mubaraks legitimacy that countered their campaign to delegitimize them. Many of us understood and agreed. I believe our persistent creative actions provided some inspiration to those Egyptian organizers who had been struggling for years and were now well on their way to changing their world.
From the presidential palace to the United Nations, the US and French embassies, and the jewel of the city, the Egyptian Museum, we took space and took action. The police efforts to stop us failed, for no matter how hard they tried to contain us and keep us invisible, people saw what was happening. Many Egyptian activists supported us and tried to participate in our Week of Actions. Almost every time they did, however, the undercover police forced them to leave, adding fuel to their discontent.
In thinking more generally about the events that led to the Arab Spring, I’m reminded of the lessons from complexity science, which teaches that the process of change and growth is not linear, but cyclical and forward-moving. There is often no clear cause and effect, but small actions, perturbations, and fluctuations that can cause an entire system to change. When the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Tunisia, who would have guessed that the monarchy would fall? This is the process of emergence, when something new arises from what once was. These same truths can create negative outcomes as well, as small actions ripple through unstable systems, shifting things in radical, unpredictable ways. From the beauty of the Arab Spring, we also saw atrocities and pain in Egypt and the roots of what became the Syrian Civil War.
As people organizing in this complex world, we can take action and push things in the direction we hope for, while recognizing that we are not in control of the outcomes.
As international activists in Cairo, we had many levels of privilege protecting us—yet despite this privilege, the government still tried to repress us. This is why people in authoritarian societies are afraid to confront their governments: The consequences can be brutal. Our privilege allowed us to be less afraid as we demonstrated what was possible. Much of what we did was simply occupying space, being visible to the public and uncompromising in our dissent, showing that the people have the power to take, hold, and transform spaces of government control into zones of liberation and resistance.
People’s occupations—which essentially just means taking and holding space—are one of the oldest tactics in the book. (Governments can also occupy, and to great harm, which we saw when the colonizers occupied this continent, and see again in Palestine today.) Governments come up with countless laws to prevent the people from fighting for their livelihoods, rights, and needs, but no law can prevent a person from existing in a public space. Sometimes there are severe consequences for doing so, but there is little that can be done to prevent people from showing up and being seen.
Occupations for liberation allow us to hold, reclaim, transform, liberate, move through, and shift space that has been taken by oppressors. Taking space is physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Occupations signal that we will hold our ground and that we are prepared to fight for what we love. Resistance can take many forms, but fundamentally it is about exposing and changing those who oppress, refusing to let them fully escape the consequences of their actions—even if the consequence is simply facing the people they are hurting. We may be outnumbered, outspent, and outgunned, but our very presence makes clear that we do not consent.
In Cairo I often felt disappointed at our failure to hold space for longer periods of time—to extend the occupation. But looking back on it, even holding space for a short period had a big effect, because these were spaces the government was accustomed to controlling more fully.
Some occupations are short-lived, but their effects ripple in ways that are never fully quantified or understood. In 2011 the mass occupations of the Arab Spring inspired the occupation at the Wisconsin capital in protest of the then governor Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation and pro-corporate budget. That occupation sent waves of joy across the US, and even though that particular battle was lost, our imaginations had been ignited, making the idea of Occupy Wall Street more possible. Occupy Wall Street, in turn, helped inspire the occupation of Gezi Park in Turkey in 2013 and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong in 2014.
Longer-term occupations, like the one in Tahrir Square, can succeed in permanently displacing the people in power. Downtown Cairo became a place and space of liberation, and though the government retaliated, it ultimately had to flee.
Thinking about the Global Justice movement as a whole, the ongoing protests of the G8, the WTO, the FTAA, and others caused the people in power to erect fences around entire portions of cities because the people occupied the streets. In this case it wasn’t a particular government, but rather capitalism, neoliberalism, and intergovernmental trade deals that the people were protesting. By occupying literal physical spaces, we also occupied and eroded the psychological spaces where world leaders allowed themselves to believe that their polices were inevitable.
When the powers that be need to hide away behind fences or in hard-to-get places, it has a psychic effect. It erodes them at some energetic level. They might feel anger, humiliation, or just inconvenience— whatever they’re feeling, they are forced to think about their actions. Their conviction that what they’re doing is just certainly diminishes, if only in a small way.
When we choose the ground on which we will fight, our opponent cannot ignore us, at least not for long. Great examples of this were the protests surrounding the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, a small city on the northern coast of Germany.
OUT OF THE TOOLBOX
Swarming and Crowd Tactics
Swarming is a natural phenomenon—ants colonize, birds flock, fish school, animals herd, and bees swarm. It is a form of intelligence that emerges from decentralized interactions within a large group.
Swarm tactics are when a dispersed group of people suddenly converge for an action at a specified time and place, like our “ballpark” strategy in Cancún. It can also be more spontaneous or revealed at the last second, like a flash mob or flash meeting.
Similar to the swarm tactic is the dispersal tactic, when a crowd suddenly separates and disperses quickly in different directions. This keeps the opposition off guard and unprepared for what you will do next. This is also good for when people get cornered and surrounded by cops. New opportunities are created the second you start moving. With random crowd tactics, the general idea is to keep moving, as this creates possibilities you cannot foresee. Never sit still, even when they block your way or when you don’t have a plan. The challenge is capitalizing on opportunities once they appear. How do you communicate contingency plans to the larger group: Flags? Texts? SMS? Random tactics can incorporate lots of carnival-like elements.
Tips for Swarm Tactics
Remember that in swarms there is no centralized control, but there is a decentralized process of following and leading.
For swarms to work well, we need to use our judgment and make choices based on the information we have in the moment. We need to avoid fragmentation, where we’re not in touch with what others are thinking or doing, and we want to make sure we have built trust so that everyone feels like they’re a part of the group.
When beginning a swarm, look at the diversity of options and identify a range of possibilities. From there, narrow the choices and select based on what will work well in that moment in the local conditions.
Stick together, but not too tight. Avoid crowding and collisions.
Go in the same basic direction.
If the swarm is under attack, scatter in a flash in many directions. You might also encircle the attacker or split into multiple groups. Come back together when the threat has passed.
Germany 2007: Taking Space in Heiligendamm
The global protests against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, showed a resurgence of energy not seen since Seattle. It somehow made sense that the anger in Germany in 2007 matched how people felt in Seattle in 1999. The neoliberal policies that we in the US had been living with since the late ’70s were really beginning to peak in Western Europe, where contracts and legal obligations among labor, the employers, and the government have always been stronger, with better employee benefits and a more reliable safety net. Europeans were beginning to suffer from the corporate practices that had long been a mainstay in the US, such as dodging employee benefits via part-time, contract, and temp arrangements. They called it precarity.
Major global summits like the G8 had historically met in large cities, but the Global Justice movement had the capitalists on the run, forcing them to choose secluded, rural locations where they hid from the people they claimed to represent. For the 2007 G8 summit, the administration of Chancellor Angela Merkel chose Heiligendamm, an isolated resort town on the northern coast of Germany. The summit itself took place at the Grand Hotel Heiligendamm, an exclusive luxury hotel on an isolated compound surrounded by a dense border of forests and the open fields and bogs of the countryside.
A $17 million fence was erected around that hotel.11 The government thought the location would be easy to secure, but they underestimated the power and creativity of the people.
There was a tremendous infrastructure set up to support the anti-G8 mobilization. With the summit in the middle of nowhere, convergence centers were established in multiple cities, including Rostock (twenty-five miles from the Grand Hotel), Hamburg, and Berlin. Informational booths about the mobilization were set up in parks and on street corners.
Two main camps were erected closer to the summit. One, Camp Rostock, was organized by mainstream NGOs and the Block G8 effort. The other, Camp Reddelich, was only five kilometers from the Grand Hotel and housed the more militant direct-action-oriented folks. This was where I stayed. Camp Reddelich was stunning, perhaps the best infrastructure of any camp I have participated in thanks to the Wandergesellen, the German craftspeople who built bathrooms, showers, a stage, a bar, a playground, and a watch tower. Tents were set up neatly in rows, and a massive central tent had geometrically arranged hay bales for seats. An Indy Media Center, a pirate radio station, and a group of videographers calling themselves G8TV not only documented everything that happened, but also projected each day’s events in the evenings for people to watch.
On June 2, several days before the summit began on June 8, over a hundred thousand people converged in Rostock for the Make Capitalism History march to protest the G8’s lack of action on critical issues like poverty, war, and the climate.12 The march was festive, but the tension between police and demonstrators was hard to miss. The German police had waged a crackdown, raiding homes, offices, and convergence spaces in Hamburg and Berlin. The media was amplifying the politicians’ unfounded accusations of terrorists among the demonstrators. Nothing was found to prove these accusations, but the police used these public scare tactics to legitimize illegal actions like no-go zones, canceling permits, and instituting travel bans to prevent international protestors from joining.
As we got closer to the summit’s opening, thousands of us hunkered down in the two camps, Rostock and Reddelich. Our goal was to somehow block access to the hotel on the two primary roads leading to it. Both were rural roads. One was to the west of the municipality of Reddelich, the other was to the east, coming from Rostock and the town of Bad Doberan. Between the hotel and both of these roads were open fields and woods.
At Camp Reddelich, I offered some direct-action prep sessions and attended those held by others. As the opening day of the summit neared, these trainings shifted toward a plan put forth by some of the German anti-nuclear activists called the Block G8 initiative: Together they were advocating for mass civil disobedience and something called the five-finger strategy. This turned out to be one of the most brilliant space-occupying tactics I have seen.
The goal of the five-finger strategy in Heiligendamm was to block the roads leading to the Grand Hotel. On both sides of these isolated roads were wet, boggy open fields. We knew the roads would be protected by hundreds, if not thousands, of riot police.
During the training I watched in amazement as the Germans demonstrated how to approach the police not in row formation, but in column formation, with multiple columns approaching a line of police. As the columns get closer to the police lines, they begin to spread out, like the fingers on a hand separating slowly then straining wide apart. These separate fingers, or streams, divide into yet smaller streams, and when they reach the row of police, the person at the front of each stream tries to jump between two officers. When those two officers reach for that person, the next person in the column jumps through the space opening up in the police line, and this process continues one person after another.
The Germans believed that by using this strategy, we could flow between the police lines and successfully achieve a peaceful occupation of the road.
A group of us from the US had formed an affinity group, and as the first Day of Action began, we were undecided about which action to join.13 Ultimately our group decided to split up and participate in different actions, with myself and three others taking off to catch up with the five-finger march. We made our way up a dirt road and came out into a field bordered by giant evergreen trees, where about a hundred yards to our right, along the tree line, we saw a massive human river of parallel marching columns flow over a rise in the hill. It was thrilling.
We ran to catch up and joined one of the columns. Our backpacks were filled with food, extra layers of clothes, and a space blanket that the organizers distributed to everyone. We held yellow net bags filled with hay, which the organizers had also distributed. I didn’t really get why we had those bags until we came over a rise and had to cross a shallow creek. The bags were piled together to create a little bridge to step across without soaking your feet. Brilliant!
Over the next rise, our mass march began to divide into columns of five, each streaming forward but with increasing space in between. Before long, we could see the road ahead. Sure enough, there were police all along it, facing the fields. As we got closer to the road, each human river continued to separate into smaller streams, each running parallel to the next. The time was upon us to take the space. The first person in each line jumped between two police, and as the officers leaned in the grab them, the next person jumped through.
We were determined and we moved quickly. Jump here, jump there, jump through. Thousands of us did this, one after the other. We were like water flowing through every possible opening, flooding past the police and onto the road. It was working! We completely overwhelmed them, and before I knew it we had taken the road.
The police gave up and retreated to the security fence, now the only thing standing between us and the hotel. It was not necessary for us to take down the fence, as we had already shut down access to the hotel by occupying the road.
It was a gorgeous, sunny day. Our occupation became like a festival as our joy in success was abundant. We shared food, conversations, and fun. A group in superhero costumes moved through, stopping here and again to do a piece of street theater demonstrating their superpowers. The clowns had moved to the security fence and were blowing bubbles through it. Some cut down the green net fencing on the side of the road and made hammocks in the woods on the road’s perimeter. Soon enough mobile kitchen trucks from our nearby camp appeared and began distributing food. All those wonderful hay-filled bags made great seats, from which we ate and watched as the police landed helicopters in the surrounding fields. Out of them came more riot police.
When night approached and the cool air settled around us, the hay bags became pillows while the space blankets kept us warm. I walked among the crowd, the space blankets reflecting the moonlight like a shimmering sea. This calm sea rocked us deep into sleep as we rested, preparing for potential rough waters ahead.
The next morning we learned that those blocking the other road, the one leading from the town of Bad Doberan, had been hit hard by the police, who emerged from helicopters in the fields and started just beating people. We also learned that a small road to the southwest near the town of Wittenbeck was being used by G8 attendees to get in, so we made a new plan. Some of us would stay, while others would try to get to the other road. I had a rental car and we decided to go. Once there, I saw that the police had created a checkpoint. Pretending to be a tourist, I asked a cop what was going on. He said there were protestors everywhere and nowhere. At that exact moment hundreds of people bolted out of the woods, crossed the road, and headed into the woods on the other side. We joined in.
The woods opened into a field, and on the other side of the field was the back road we sought, now lined with a fence and water cannons. The day became a dance of people challenging the fence, using tarp banners for protection from the water cannons. A group of drag queens showed up with giant multicolored beach umbrellas. There were clowns everywhere and a naked bloc that marched in formation toward the police only to be pepper-sprayed in their most vulnerable places, and oh that did not look fun.
In the end, the roads leading to the Grand Hotel were blockaded or occupied during the three-day summit. Leaders of the G8 had to arrive and leave via helicopter or boat. No matter how hard they tried, they could not hide as we exposed the unpopularity of their policies and undemocratic processes.
Some occupations last for years, while others last for hours or days. In either case they create space to practice self-organization, as well as time for infrastructure building, strategic action planning, and care for one another. From these spaces, we can launch myriad actions that both disrupt and liberate. In my experience, occupations can be successful in less tangible ways because they are so visible. They ignite imaginations; they build community and can change the narrative put forth by the state.
We see occupations happening all the time. In February 2018 teachers in West Virginia occupied the state capitol during a teachers’ strike, which led to a 5 percent pay increase. These courageous actions inspired similar teachers’ strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and Los Angeles. Groups around the country have attempted to occupy ICE facilities, and while there has been limited ongoing success, there were days when the facilities or courts had to close. These actions speak for themselves and keep the resistance alive. Increasingly we are seeing occupations by students, by immigrants, and by climate activists. The occupation outside the Tornillo child detention camp in December 2018 inspired people across the country to step up their creative resistance to immigrant detentions.
With every election cycle, a lot of people become focused on voting, believing that it’s the best way to change things. But occupations and other space-taking tactics remind us this isn’t true. It’s an insidious argument. Democracy is not just pushing a button every two years; it’s how we live our lives and shape our future every day. It requires participation, effort, commitment, and risk. We are all agents of change, whether we see it or not. But change requires action, creativity, and, at times, sacrifice—a willingness to risk what you have for something greater. We all make choices every day that can either oppress or liberate. We can keep perpetuating the negativity of the status quo, or we can choose life—engagement, community, self-organization, and action. Which do you choose?