what's missing from miral

Is it possible that an American-born Jew could make a good movie about Palestine?  Theoretically, sure.  Unfortunately, Julian Schnabel's Miral is not that film.

Let us leave aside for a moment the numerous artistic problems of the film--the Interchangeable Brown Person Casting of Indian-Portuguese Freida Pinto in the title role; the atrocious script; the mediocre directing of even veteran actors; the numerous fudges of geography (I really do not think there is a checkpoint anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem); and the many painful incidents of characters pausing to explain things for the benefit of the audience that would be perfectly obvious to any Palestinian as part of their lived experience (my favorite: one Arabic-speaking character explaining to another Arabic-speaking character what intifada means...and getting the translation wrong.)  All these shortcomings are present, but Miral's deepest flaws are political.

The main story of the film takes place primarily in occupied East Jerusalem in the years between 1967 and the First Intifada.  Yet through the magic of Hollywood, we're presented with an occupied Jerusalem in which the occupation is almost completely invisible in people's daily lives.  In this fantasy Jerusalem, no hostile soldiers roam the streets of the Old City, outlandishly large guns slung over their shoulders, alternating between flirting with tourists and harassing the locals for sport.  No crowds of women linger outside police stations waiting for news of arrested husbands, sons and brothers.  No squat green police cars prowl the streets at night declaring curfew.  Miral and her religious father cheerfully plant flowers in the garden at the Haram al-Sharif without ever having to pass through a phalanx of riot cops to get there.

There is Israeli violence, yes: a home demolition in a refugee camp, a demonstration met with live ammunition, and a chilling sequence in which Miral is arrested, humiliated and beaten unconscious in an Israeli police station, which feels so vividly authentic because it is a true story from author Rula Jebreal's youth.  In these scenes the reality of occupied Palestine is momentarily visible through the Hollywood trappings.  But the Israeli violence is always a reaction to Palestinian resistance--with the unspoken implication being that if Palestinians would stop resisting, everything would be fine.

But that is not the reality in Palestine at all.  What Miral misses entirely is that Palestinian resistance is itself a reaction to the lived reality of Israeli colonization and ethnic cleansing.  It's the daily, lifelong parade of insults, humiliations, difficulties, pain and suffering imposed by the occupation that fuels Palestinian resistance again and again.  Palestinians don't have to do anything special to invite repression from the Israeli state.  They just have to exist.  Without showing the daily grind of misery and oppression that Palestinians face, Palestinian resistance becomes completely unmotivated, or motivated by abstract hatred of "the Jews"--which is exactly how Americans like their violence from Arabs.

Also missing from Miral is the mass popular character of the First Intifada, which was primarily a movement of strikes, boycotts and unarmed street protests--not unlike those sweeping the Middle East today.  It was a mass movement which touched all of Palestinian society.  Yet Miral manages to separate its main characters' daily lives from revolt, struggle and politics--something absolutely unheard of in Palestine.  Resistance is portrayed as a marginal, exotic, minority activity, alien and separate from ordinary people's lives.

The two characters who are unambiguously positive forces in Miral's life--her adoptive father (Alexander Siddig) and teacher Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass)--are openly hostile to resistance.  Not only is this politically reactionary; it's completely unbelievable.  If there is one defining characteristic of life in Palestine, it's the way in which politics forces its way into every aspect of people's lives, making the most ordinary tasks into de facto acts of resistance.  It's highly implausible that someone like Hind Husseini, who flies a Palestinian flag in her window (and somehow manages to get away with it in the pre-Oslo days when such an act was an arrestable offense) would berate her young students for attending demonstrations at a time when the whole of Palestinian society was in revolt.

While Miral herself frequently gives militant speeches, her forays into resistance seem naive and ineffectual and universally end in disaster.  A fellow student is killed at a demonstration and the anger is directed not at the soldier who saw fit to shoot an unarmed teenage girl, but at Miral herself for being so stupid as to drag her friend along to a protest.  Her fling with a vaguely-defined "PLO activist" results in arrest, torture, and alienation from her father.  Throughout it all, everyone's goals and politics are vague and muddy, and Miral comes off looking stupid and manipulated.  Even her wish for "one country where we can live together with equal rights" is dismissed as the silly dream of an idealistic child, as the film becomes an unabashed Oslo Accords love-fest in its closing moments.

We get a glimpse of Schnabel's politics earlier in the film, in a long, overly expositional rant against settlers as the driving force behind the occupation.  By placing the blame on settlers, Schnabel lets the rest of Israeli society off the hook for the original act of colonization.  This goes hand-in-hand with his strident defense of the two-state "solution," despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that it is both impossible and unjust.  The blame-the-settlers-for-hijacking-our-country-which-is-otherwise-perfectly-fine logic is essentially the J Street position, and Miral is J Street politics in a movie.  A component of this politics is the idea that the majority of Palestinians just want to live their lives but are being held hostage by a stubborn minority who insist on resisting and fucking everything up for everyone else who just wants to live in peace.  Completely missing, of course, is the idea that Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is itself the thing that is holding back genuine peace with justice.

The final element missing from Miral is more subjective and ephemeral.  Through a maudlin, directionless script and the overuse of tragic music, Schnabel manages to suck all the emotional intensity out of one of the most intense places on earth.  Schnabel's Palestine is a dreary tragedy, completely devoid of the warmth, wicked humor, communal strength and indomitable spirit that most visitors fall in love with when they travel there.  Completely lost is the idea that resistance (in whatever form one chooses) can be a source not just of suffering but of empowerment and joy, and that despite a seemingly endless supply of pain, Palestine is a place worth loving and fighting for.

the cruelty is in the details

In his report to the United Nations, Judge Richard Goldstone described the actions of the Israeli state as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population."  He was writing, of course, about Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli assault that pulverized the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009.  But I've often thought about how perfectly those words describe so many things that Israel does.

The Israeli repressive machinery has had a long time to develop--over sixty years--and consequently it is very finely tuned.  There are many states that treat the populations under their control with just as much violence as Israel does, but few that do it with such precise, intentional, and coldly calculated sadism.

The latest example comes to me thanks to the excellent reporting of Joseph Dana, writing on the left-wing Israeli blog +972 Magazine.  Dana travels frequently throughout the West Bank to document Palestinians' nonviolent struggles and their repression.  Lately the village of Nabi Saleh has been the site of the following scene:

Heavily armed Israeli soldiers enter the village at two or three in the morning.  They surround the houses and wake everyone up.  What are they doing in the village at three in the morning?  They are photographing children--all the male children of the village.  They have a list.  Why are they doing this?  So that when they arrest the boys, they'll know who's who.  Why is the Israeli army arresting teen and pre-teen boys?  So they can torture them into implicating their parents and their parents' friends, who are organizing nonviolent resistance in the village.

But they don't just go about their torture of children willy-nilly.  No.  They pre-screen.  Children arrested the first time are given a brief "interview" and released after an hour or two.  Based on these interviews, the Shabak (secret police) decide which of the children are weakest and most likely to "confess" that certain adults are the leaders of the village popular committees that organize the demonstrations.  These kids are then arrested again and tortured.  One of the unlucky boys in Nabi Saleh was Islam Tamimi, age 14.  Apparently whatever he said after a terrifying late-night arrest, hours of questioning, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to nighttime cold was not good enough, because his 11-year-old brother was arrested the next day.

I have heard many stories of Palestinian children being arrested in the West Bank.  But for some reason no one ever really explained the full horror of it.  It's something about the two-step process that gets me.  This isn't random harassment or reactionary violence.  It's targeted, deliberate, premeditated.  Someone planned it.  They sat down and thought: What is the most efficient way to traumatize children?  How can I do this in a way that will inflict the most fear, pain and suffering on the greatest number of people?  The boy, subjected to an adult-sized dose of repression.  His parents and siblings, who often don't know where he's been taken but certainly know what is happening to him.  The village activists, painfully aware that this is retaliation for their organizing.  The whole village, subjected to collective punishment for its resistance.

The final cruelty is that the confessions that these children almost always sign after hours or days of suffering and terror are completely superfluous.  Israel doesn't need an excuse to arrest anyone in the West Bank.  They charged Bil'in activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah with weapons possession for having a peace sign made of spent tear gas canisters in his yard.  He is still in prison.  And it's not as if the popular committees and their leaders are underground or secret.  They have websites and Facebook pages.  They host internationals and Israelis in their homes every Friday.  Everyone in the village knows who they are.

So, you might ask, what is the point?  To deliberately scar the next generation, by giving young boys the experience of being broken under torture before they reach puberty?  To make children feel the overwhelming power of the Israeli state from a young age?  To teach them, at 10 or 12 or 14, what it feels like to be made to denounce someone you know and trust and care about, to watch them be dragged off to prison, possibly for years, because of a piece of paper you signed despite the fact it was most likely written in a language you cannot read?

One of the hardest things to explain to people who are not familiar with the Occupied Territories is the sheer number of things Israeli soldiers and police do just because they can, for no reason other than to prove their power over the civilian Palestinian population.  Sometimes the dominance is banal--a long line or a petty humiliation at a checkpoint.  Sometimes it's a surgical strike: resist and we will take your children away in the night and hurt them.  While the Arab world burns with revolution, the machinery of Israeli colonialism grinds on, cold, implacable, and thoroughly planned.

This is why certain famous people glibly condemning the "nihilism on both sides of the conflict" sends me into apoplectic fits on the internet.  Because anyone who actually bothers to look can quite easily see a different reality in Palestine: on one side, a vicious colonial state armed to the teeth by the US, and on the other, a 14-year-old boy, waking up at two in the morning to find soldiers around his bed.  That people continue to resist under such conditions, with whatever means are available to them, is not nihilism.  It's a demonstration of unbelievable courage.

elia suleiman puts the nakba on film

New developments continue apace in Egypt, and I'll write about them shortly.  But I have to take a break from current events to write about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, which recently screened at Columbia as part of a film festival organized by the new, wonderful Center for Palestine Studies there.

I'm tempted to say The Time That Remains has eclipsed Annemarie Jacir's brilliant Salt of This Sea as my favorite Palestinian film, but that's really an unfair comparison.  Salt of This Sea is an extraordinary first feature by a filmmaker who surely has many great things ahead.  The Time That Remains is the masterpiece of a mature artist completely in control of his craft.  It's rare that you see a director's aesthetic and political vision so perfectly, flawlessly realized.

Suleiman is best known in the US for his 2002 film Divine Intervention, a series of loosely connected tragicomic vignettes (or tableaux, as Suleiman refers to them) about life under Israeli occupation.  Metaphorical, surreal, and often bitterly funny, they showed the banal absurdity of Israeli colonization, but many of the subtleties are probably lost on an American audience with little knowledge of Palestine's history.

In The Time That Remains Suleiman brings his trademark visual inventiveness and gallows humor to a far more linear narrative--the story of his own family from 1948 to the present day.  It is mostly the story of his father Fuad (Saleh Bakri), who was a young man in Nazareth in 1948, using his basement workshop to make guns for a Palestinian resistance that was hopelessly outmatched by the conquering Zionist militias that became the Israeli army.

Suleiman has an unparalleled eye for the individual moments of domination, humiliation and resistance that make up life under a repressive system.  He has a knack for creating scenes that are simultaneously blackly funny and deeply horrifying, as in the case of a madcap chase between doctors and soldiers over an unseen, wounded Palestinian who will end up either patient or prisoner in an Israeli jail.  When he turns his gaze to the original moment of conquest, the results are breathtaking.  The whole film is good, but the 1948 section is unforgettable.  Under the unflinching gaze of his breathlessly still camera, scenes of casual cruelty and brutality play out in long takes, businesslike and implacable, and we are unable to look away, because he won't let us. 

There is one scene in particular, a scene of stunning violence that takes place in a postcard-perfect olive grove, that may be one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a movie.  It is a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of occupation and resistance.  It should be studied by every film student ever as an example of how to film violence effectively.  There are no smash cuts or dramatic music here, and none are necessary.  At a key moment, the only sound is the wind in the olive trees.  The horror of the action speaks for itself.

As I watched the 1948 section of the movie, which is largely based on Suleiman's parents' letters and journals, it occurred to me that I had never seen some of these things on film before.  Is Suleiman really the first person to depict the Nakba in a non-documentary film?  I can't believe that's true, and yet I can't think of another example.

As we move closer to the present day, the narrative fragments into Suleiman's trademark vignettes, only tenuously connected and often dreamlike or abstract.  At the Q&A I attended, Suleiman said this was because the film becomes less his father's story and more his own as it progresses.  But I think there is a political message too.  The past is vivid, whole, and horrifying, while the present is suspended, fragmented and opaque, its meaning unclear.  The past is more real than the present, always there in the margins, as if it too is a present absentee.

Suleiman's family's story, like Palestine's, is a tragedy for now, its ending yet unwritten.  Out of it Suleiman has made a splendid film: beautiful, funny, breathtaking, and also heartbreaking.  More than anything, it made me want to make a movie, which is the highest praise I can think to give a film.

goodbye mubarak!

Man, I'm glad I stayed up late last night to write the previous post.  Because it's now out of date.

Mubarak is gone, toppled from power by a popular revolt and a mass strike wave.  Power has been transferred not to torturer-in-chief Suleiman (which I think the US would have preferred but the Egyptian people never would have accepted) but directly to the military.

The coming days will tell what military rule will bring to Egypt.  It seems very likely further battles must be fought.  But there is no doubt that the first stage of this revolution has ended with a resounding victory for the people and a defeat for the US empire.

No matter what else happens, several myths should be smashed forever: that Arabs and Muslims don't want or can't handle democracy, that ordinary people don't have the power to change things from below, and that the US government, powerful though it is, always gets what it wants.  This is a victory not just for Egypt, not just for the Middle East, but for the whole world.

Tonight the Egyptian people and their comrades everywhere will celebrate.  Tomorrow the struggle continues.

Tahrir Square tonight.  Photo credit: Matthew Cassel.

egypt's revolutionaries: smart, brave and lucky

I keep trying to sit down to write another post about the Egyptian revolution, but things are changing so quickly I can't keep up.  I woke up Thursday to reports that Mubarak was expected to step down.  Egypt was ecstatic.  But he didn't step down and now Egypt is furious.  Who knows what today will bring?

One of the defining features of the Egyptian revolution has been its amazing tactical flexibility.  Using tactics reminiscent of everything from the French Revolution to the Palestinian intifada, the protesters have consistently outmaneuvered a police state with as much repressive strength as any foreign military occupation.  Now a fascinating article in--of all places--the Wall Street Journal gives us an insight into how the protest that started it all was planned.  Answer: extremely well.

I'm not going to spend time recapping the article--you should just read it--but it involves a secret meeting point, some low-tech, decidedly non-online organizing, and the desperate hope that if a few hundred people turned up in the street with no cops around, thousands and then millions would follow.  And it shows the brains, creativity and sheer nerve of Egypt's new generation of radicals, mostly people my age and younger, who have never known an Egypt without Mubarak.

The mainstream media have repeatedly called this a "leaderless" revolution.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of leaders.  Just because we don't know their names doesn't mean they don't exist.  They do exist, they planned this revolution, and they planned it well.  For weeks they brainstormed how to get around the central tactical problem of any protest in Egypt: the fact that the police have huge numbers at their command and can physically surround (or "kettle," as the Brits say) any demonstration to keep it from moving.  They planned their demonstration like a guerrilla military operation--which, in a certain sense, it was--organizing in cells at times, using disinformation to confuse the cops, and accepting that some of the protests on the 25th could be broken up as long as at least one succeeded in marching.

These activists knew their city, their fellow citizens and their state, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.  They knew Cairo's enormous size could be used to their advantage by calling for many separate protests and spreading the riot police thin across the sprawling metropolis.  They knew how to avoid arrest and being spied on--frequently switching phones and sleeping locations, trusting certain information to only a few people--because they had been organizing under condition of dictatorship for years, whether in support of the Palestinian intifada, in solidarity with the strike waves that have rocked Egypt regularly for the past several years, or against the brutal police murder of Khaled Said last summer.  They knew the poor neighborhood where they planned to march was a place where no one used Facebook or Twitter, so they organized the old-fashioned way, with photocopied leaflets.  They had allies in the older generation--like the mother of one of the organizers, a veteran of Egypt's last wave of mass struggle, the 1977 bread riots.  And overall, after the success of the Tunisian revolution, they believed the moment was right in Egypt and had the courage to seize it.

In retrospect this plan looks brilliant, because it worked.  But it could have collapsed at so many points.  The police could have gotten wind of the secret 21st location.  The organizers could have been spied on or infiltrated and all arrested before they even got to the meeting point.  The mass of people they were counting on to protect them could have failed to materialize, hanging back out of fear instead of surging into the street.  If any of these things had happened, the leaders would have been isolated, arrested and tortured like so many before them--like many of them had been in the past, in fact.  This could so easily have been a suicide mission.  I'm sure at times organizers thought it was.  To even attempt such a plan required incredible courage--and the political astuteness to know that the time was ripe for the spark to start a blaze.

The times was ripe, as it turned out, and people have joined the protests in ever-increasing numbers.  Although there is no guarantee that the revolutionaries won't make a tactical mistake somewhere down the road, they haven't made one yet.  The proof is in the fact that the movement is still going and has gotten stronger.  Meanwhile the regime has pulled trick after trick out of its bag to try to crush the protests, with no success.  When Mubarak pulled his police off the streets to try to create chaos and looting, neighborhoods organized committees to defend themselves.  When he sent thugs into the street to attack the protests, people fought back, barricaded the square and drove the thugs out.  In a flash mass protests turned into street battles--highly organized and successful ones--and it is now possible to speak of front lines and positions taken and held around Tahrir Square.  When the regime stalled for time with fruitless negotiations (sound familiar?) the protesters used that time to widen and deepen the revolution, expanding the borders of the "liberated zone," organizing street protests that have only gotten larger, and in the last few days, organizing strikes that have the potential to bring the considerable weight of Egypt's working class fully behind the revolution in an organized manner.

In order to win a revolution you need to be simultaneously smart, brave and lucky, because when the stakes are so high one wrong move can kill you.  As dawn breaks over Cairo on the 18th day of protests--a Friday, the start of the weekend in Egypt--organizers are calling for a march to the presidential palace.  It promises to be massive.  At least 10,000 people have also surrounded the state TV building, with, it seems, the goal of taking it over.  The role of the army is still an unknown, and is the factor that I'm told many people on the ground are now discussing.  Momentum is still on the protesters' side, and at this point I doubt even a total bloodbath would roll it back.  No one knows what will happen today, but this revolution may very well be just beginning.

this isn't chaos. it's a revolution.

Events in Egypt have been unfolding too quickly for me to both follow the news and blog about it (while also doing other things like work, eat and sleep...no surprise, that last one is the first to go).  So although my last post was only three days ago, several important things have happened that need discussing.

On Tuesday there was a call for a "March of Millions," and the Egyptian people responded.  Somewhere between six and eight million people protested across the country--not just in Cairo but in Alexandria, Suez, and smaller cities like the industrial center of Mahalla, the scene of militant strikes in the past few years.  Somewhere around a million people poured into Tahrir Square.  The atmosphere was festive, elated, and completely peaceful.  All day people rallied in the square, doing things that would have been unthinkable a week before: chanting, singing, reading poetry over the rave-worthy speaker systems that have been set up, hurling insults at the dictator and talking, talking, talking--thirty years' worth of banned political discussion bursting forth in an exhilarated flood.  When it was time for observant Muslims to pray, hundreds of people prayed in the street, and Christians formed a human chain around them to keep them safe.

The announcement that Mubarak was going to speak "shortly" came on state TV around eight p.m.  Nearly four hours later, Mubarak turned up.  He announced he wouldn't run for a new term as president in September (something he also said when he was first sworn into office...30 years ago) and offered some other token concessions that may or may not ever be delivered.  No mention of lifting the emergency law, which gives police sweeping powers.  No mention of changes to the constitution that would allow freerer elections.  No hint of remorse for those killed and wounded by police and paid thugs in the past week--but rather aggressive rhetoric blaming the demonstrators for "chaos" and "violence."

Shortly after Mubarak's speech ended, two things happened in quick succession.  First, the streets erupted.  People were furious.  It was clear the speech didn't placate anyone.

Very shortly after that, crowds of armed pro-government thugs began converging on the protests in both Cairo and Alexandria.  The army checkpoints that had searched every protester for weapons--sometimes several times--mysteriously melted away in the presence of a mix of plainclothes police and paid thugs.  They were armed, organized, and attacked the protesters almost simultaneously in Cairo and Alexandria.  Clearly this had been planned in advance.  In retrospect, Mubarak's message was perfectly clear.  "This is all you're going to get.  Now get off the streets--and if you don't, we'll make you."

All night and into the next day, wave after wave of government-backed goons attacked the protesters, trying to drive them out of Tahrir Square.  But the protesters resisted--courageously, brilliantly, over and over again.

Western media had tended to report these events using phrases like "descended into chaos and violence."  That is not what happened on Wednesday.  It was not chaos or aimless rioting.  It was a pitched street battle, and an extremely well-organized one at that.  Protesters fought back with any weapon they could improvise.  Paving stones were torn up for ammunition, delivered to the front lines in bags and buckets and rugs.  Barricades bloomed out of scrap metal, Dumpster lids, furniture, even massive streets signs of the size that hang off overpasses.  People assembled shields and helmets out of anything they could find.  A makeshift hospital went into operation in a storefront mosque, the cubbies where people normally leave their shoes filled with medical supplies smuggled in through army checkpoints.  Hour after hour, men and women, young and old, fought back with incredible bravery and resourcefulness against stones dropped off rooftops, an "endless supply" of Molotov cocktails, and snipers shooting live ammunition.  And they won.  They held their position, refused to be driven out of the square, and by the end of the day had recaptured territory from the pro-Mubarak forces.

Those who lament the "descent" (really, escalation) into violence should consider the alternative.  The thugs were going to attack no matter what the protesters did.  There were only two choices--retreat or fight back.  Retreat and protesters would have been chased like animals through the streets, scattered, isolated, beaten and possibly killed in dark alleys, or arrested and dragged off to be tortured by a regime that has shown no mercy against far less threatening political movements.  The loss of control of Tahrir Square, so soon after the huge protest on Wednesday, would have been a huge psychological blow to the movement and might have demoralized people who came out to their first protest on that day.  The inexperienced and those with something to lose would have retreated in fear.  The militants would have been isolated and savagely repressed.  The only reason that didn't happen was that people decided to fight back.

The current reports are of between four and twelve people killed, all on the side of the demonstrators.  There are hundreds of wounded.  But if people had not fought back it would have been far bloodier, a massacre that could have broken the movement.  A young female protester, calling in to Al Jazeera English in the middle of the night, articulated the stakes very plainly.  "If we give up now, they will hunt us down," she said.  Her voice was shaking with fear.  But she wasn't planning on leaving the square.

All day today, protesters reinforced barricades, treated the wounded and fought off further attempts by thugs to penetrate the square.  They developed communication systems--banging on the iron railings all around Tahrir to signal when danger was approaching.  Someone jerry-rigged a street light so people could charge their cell phones.  By evening Tahrir was again home to several hundred thousand people.

Now dawn is breaking in Egypt on the day people have declared the "Day of Departure" for Mubarak.  In the past ten days the Egyptian people have demonstrated the full measure of intelligence, creativity, solidarity, courage and determination that human beings are capable of.  Regardless of whether Mubarak leaves today, they can win.

cracks in the american bloc

Once upon a time, a nuclear-armed superpower ruled over a host of client states by backing brutal dictators, who used state-controlled media, prisons, torture, and vast armies of secret police to repress dissent among their populations and ensure that the superpower's economic philosophy and foreign policy aims could be carried out unimpeded.

These dictators ruled for decades.  Any revolt was swiftly and violently crushed.  Their regimes seemed unshakable.  And then, within a year, all of them collapsed beneath the tide of a mass, democratic, nonviolent popular movement.  The movement not only swept away the tinpot client dictators, but washed back over the superpower itself and caused massive changes there.

I'm talking, of course, about the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91.  But surely you see where I'm going with this.  Today the "American bloc" in the Middle East is being shaken by a titanic wave of struggle that may be only in its earliest phases.  The Tunisian people overthrew a US-backed dictator who had ruled for 23 years--and have continued to toss out multiple interim governments that contain members of the old guard.  Protests (smaller, certainly, but still significant) have erupted in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Yemen--even Saudi Arabia.  Not all of these nations are ruled by US-backed dictators, but their people all face similar, interrelated problems: a lack of basic democratic freedoms, skyrocketing food prices, infrastructure and social services gutted by IMF-mandated privatization and austerity, and chronic unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, while a handful of cronies at the top enrich themselves by selling off the country's natural resources to the Global North.

While all of these revolts have galvanized the Middle East, and the world, none has created so much hope and joy, and so many problems for the US, as the intifada that is shaking the cornerstone of America's imperial control of the Middle East, the most populous Arab country--Egypt.  Egypt's "president" Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 30 years--longer than two thirds of Egyptians have been alive.  His state security forces are ubiquitous, violent and terrifying.  His country was the first one the CIA turned to when setting up its torture-outsourcing extraordinary rendition program.  His government cooperates with Israel to maintain the siege of Gaza, against the wishes of the vast majority of his population, and is rewarded with $1.5 billion a year in US military aid.  After Israel he is certainly the US government's most important strongman in the region.  And now he teeters on the brink of being toppled.  For six days now, protesters have defied tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, live ammunition, savage beatings, mass arrests, threats of curfew, tanks in the streets and helicopters and fighter jets in the sky.  They have effectively driven Mubarak's internal security apparatus off the streets--not just in Cairo but in Alexandria, Suez, and many other cities across the country.  In a nation where political gatherings of more than five people are illegal, the people own the streets.

While these uprisings may appear to have erupted out of nowhere, like all mass struggles they are the result of contradictions in the system that have built up over many years, of long-suffered grievances and the learning curve of many small struggles.  The revolutions of 1989 seemed sudden and unexpected, even to people who participated in them.  But in retrospect we can see some of the signs that spelled the demise of the Eastern bloc a decade before its final collapse, things like the Solidarity movement in Poland and the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  (Hmm, sound familiar?)

Looking back, it's clear that the current round of revolt against the US agenda in the Middle East started with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, when young people all over the Arab world, born in the '80s and '90s, saw other young people just like them standing up to the tanks and bullets of a US ally.  In Egypt, the last three years have seen large, militant strikes by many sectors of the country's working class, which is diverse, powerful and well-organized.  What the revolution in Tunisia provided was hope.  Tunisia was the last place anyone expected a revolt, and yet just four weeks of protests drove out a dictator who had ruled for more than two decades.  It was only logical for people all over the Arab world, facing similar conditions, to ask "If they can do it, why can't we?"

Let us be clear on some things.  These are real revolutions in progress--the Muslim world's first revolutions since 1979--the first living revolutions many of us have seen in our lifetime as political activists.  They are democratic revolutions--against torture and police brutality, against one-party rule and for free elections, free speech and free assembly, and other basic civil liberties.  They are not social revolutions that battle the ruling class for control over the economic system...yet.  And no matter how much mainstream media pundits may froth at the mouth about "radical Islam," none of these movements are led or controlled by Islamists.  They are movements of Muslims, Christians and atheists, young and old, workers, students and unemployed.  Instead of being driven by one particular religious ideology, they are destroying the divisions between them.  On New Year's day a bomb ripped through a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, killing 21 people and injuring dozens more.  Today on the streets of Cairo one of the most popular chants is "Muslims, Christians, we are all Egyptians!"

It is far too early to tell how far things will go in the Middle East.  In Egypt, Mubarak totters but has not yet fallen.  The role of the army remains decisive and no one is quite sure how things will play out.  It is too early to start calling this the Arab world's 1989.  But it is not too early to imagine it.

I've written a lot and yet I'm not sure I've been able to convey the explosive joy radiating from Egypt's appropriately named Tahrir [Liberation] Square, the blaze of hope and courage and power and liberation that has lit up not just the Middle East, but the whole world.  But this video does a pretty good job.