Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 2, 1947-1948

The movement to democratize Egypt: Except for their religious beliefs, Jews shared lifestyles with those of Muslim background.

Jewish home in Egypt. Image from BBC Watch.

By Bob Feldman | The Rag Blog | January 6, 2014

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Prior to the Zionist movement’s establishment of the State of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948 and subsequent eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Palestine during the late 1940s, between 65,000 and 80,000 Egyptians of Jewish religious background lived in Egypt. Around 64 percent of Egyptians of Jewish background lived in Cairo and around 32 percent lived in Alexandria, according to the Egyptian census of 1947.

Before the establishment of Israel, Egyptian Jews “attained an inordinately high number of respectable positions in finance, commerce, industry and the professions” in post-World War II Egyptian society, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. As the Encyclopedia Judaica recalled:

In 1947 most Egyptian Jews (59%) were merchants, and the rest were employed in industry (18%), administration, and public services (11%). The economic situation of Egyptian Jewry was relatively good; there were several multi-millionaires, a phenomenon unusual in other Jewish communities of the Middle East…There were no restrictions on accepting Jews in government or foreign schools.

And in addition to the relatively prosperous Egyptians of Jewish religious background who lived in Cairo prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine, there were also “many poor Jews living in the Haret al-Ya Hud section of Cairo who were completely indistinguishable from their Muslim counterparts” in Egypt.

And, “with the exception of their adherence to religious belief, they ate, spoke, dressed, and lived in virtually identical ways” as the Egyptians of Islamic religious background, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Zionism was considered an alien ideology to most Egyptian Jews.

So, not surprisingly, although only about 20 percent of the people of Jewish religious background who lived in Egypt were officially considered Egyptian citizens in 1947, “Zionism was generally an alien ideology to most Egyptian Jews,” prior to 1947, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970; and the Jewish League to Combat Zionism (al-Rabita al-Tsrailiyya li Muk afahat al-Sahyuniyya), founded in the mid-1940s by an Egyptian named Marcel Israel, included Egyptian “leftists and communists alike,” according to the same book.

Egypt’s mid-1940s Jewish League to Combat Zionism had the following four objectives, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970: 1. “working against Zionism;” 2. “strengthening ties between Egyptian Jews and the Egyptian people in the struggle for independence;” 3. “lessen[ing] the gap between Jews and Arabs in Palestine;” and 4. “solving the problem of the Wandering Jew.”

But since the Egyptian monarchical regime’s prime minister in 1947, al-Nuqrashi, was being backed by some Egyptian Jews who were sympathetic to the Zionist movement (and who also wished to discourage Egyptians of Islamic and Jewish religious backgrounds from uniting in opposition to UK special influence in Egypt), al-Nuqrashi suppressed the Jewish League to Combat Zionism in 1947.

Yet when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine -- despite the objections of most people then living in Palestine and other Arab counties and many rank-and-file members of Egypt’s Democratic Movement for National Liberation [DMNL] -- the leftist DMNL group’s leadership -- like the Soviet Union -- endorsed the partition plan.

But in its al-Jamahir party newspaper, the DMNL also clarified its late 1947 unpopular political stance on the issue of Palestine’s partition in the following way:

We do not want to take Palestine away from the Arabs and give it to the Jews but we want to take it away from imperialism and give it to the Arabs and Jews…Then will begin the long struggle for rapprochement between Arab and Jewish states…

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 1, 1947-1948

Police crack down on strikers in Mahalla, 1947, killing three workers. Image from Hossam el-Hamalawy / Flickr.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 12: 1947-1948 period/Section 1 -- Anti-imperialist left grows; Muslim Brotherhood collaborates with Egyptian regime.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Despite the post-July 1946 political repression of Egyptian dissidents by the UK imperialist-backed monarchical regime, by the end of May 1947, a new Egyptian left anti-imperialist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation [DMNL], also known as Hadeto, was formed after EMNL and Iskra leaders united and merged their approximately 1,200 Egyptian communist supporters into one group.

Solely funded in 1947 “from subscriptions and contributions imposed upon party members,” the DMNL “had some success” recruiting more Egyptian supporters in "the textile workers’ union, the transportation union, among...communication workers, hotel workers, tobacco workers, and military men” who often met fellow Egyptian left activists downtown at the Café Issayi-vitch in Cairo, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

After the owners of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company factory in Mahalla-al-Kubra -- Egypt’s largest and most modern textile factory -- announced plans to replace over 12,000 Egyptian textile factory workers with new machinery, the textile workers went on strike in early September 1947. And after four of the striking workers were killed and 70 strikers were arrested by the Egyptian forces of “law and order,” 17,000 more Egyptian textile “workers in Shubra went on strike for one day in sympathy,” according to the same book.

The early September 1947 strike in Mahalla-al-Kubra was lost by the textile workers following its repression by the Egyptian monarchical regime. But during the last three months of 1947, additional strikes by textile factory workers in Alexandria, by oil workers in Suez, and by Egyptian teachers and telegraph workers broke out; and between 1948 and 1950 Egyptian nurses, police officers, gas workers, and textile workers in some other Egyptian cities also held strikes.

The DMNL was still an underground group that had to organize clandestinely during the late 1940s because of the repressive nature of the Egyptian regime. Besides recruiting Egyptian workers who apparently acted as catalysts for the late 1940s wave of labor strikes in Egypt, the DMNL also was able to recruit into its ranks during the 1940s some non-commissioned officers in the Egyptian military and some Egyptian peasants or fallahin.

And by the early 1950s, “the DMNL had contacts in tens of villages” in Egypt, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. In addition, by the early 1950s, there were almost 500 unions in Egypt, according to an article by Atef Said, titled “Egypt’s Long Labor History.” that appeared in Against The Current in 2009.

During the late 1940s, around 13 million Egyptians lived in Egypt’s countryside in the Nile River valley and 6 million Egyptians lived in Egyptian cities. So although the number of Egyptian factory workers had increased from 247,000 to 756,000 between 1937 and 1947, around 66 percent of Egypt’s labor force was still engaged in agricultural work in the late 1940s. And despite Egypt’s formal political independence, foreign business investors still owned 61 percent of all Egyptian companies in 1947.

Yet the various anti-imperialist left secular Egyptian political groups together still had much less mass support by the 1940s than did the religiously fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood group. As Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 observed:

[Hasan] al-Banna...established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928... Al-Banna promoted a simple and absolute message to his followers: struggle to rid Egypt of foreign occupation; defend and obey Islam... By the outbreak of World War II, the Brotherhood...movement’s strength was...estimated at somewhere from many hundreds of thousands to beyond a million activists…

But according to Robert Dreyfuss’ Devil’s Game: How The United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood was established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company, and over the next quarter century British diplomats, the intelligence service, MI6, and Cairo’s Anglophilic King Farouk would use the Muslim Brotherhood as a cudgel against Egypt’s communists and nationalists...

After World War II, Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood temporarily began to collaborate with the Egyptian  regime to block an increase of mass support for Egypt’s secular left. As the same book recalled, “between 1945 and 1948...the organization...acted on the instructions of various ruling governments, as a counterweight to the Communists” in Egypt; and the “[Muslim] Brotherhood would sabotage meetings, precipitate clashes at public gatherings and even damage property” of the left opposition groups with which the Muslim Brotherhood competed politically for recruits and which the Egyptian government had forced underground.

Egyptian prime minister al-Nuqrashi began to see the Muslim Brotherhood as a political threat to the regime and “used his martial law authority to dissolve” the organization “in November 1948.” Al-Nuqrashi was assassinated a month later by a student attached to the Brotherhood;” and, utilizing King Farouk’s bodyguards, the Egyptian government “responded by murdering Hasan al-Banna,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder and leader, in 1949, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

 [Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : My Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.

My Nelson Mandela

Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes...

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

One of the ironies of 21st century historical discourse is that despite significantly increased access to information, historical narratives are shaped by economic and political interest and ideology more than ever before.

Widely distributed accounts about iconic political figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King stun those of us who are knowledgeable about the times in which these figures lived. Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes in the economic and political structures that exploit and oppress people.

Most of the media reviews of the life and achievements of Nelson Mandela fit this model.

However, most of my remembrances of Nelson Mandela are different.

First, he committed his life to the cause of creating an economic and political system in his homeland that would provide justice for all people.

Second, Nelson Mandela was part of the great wave of revolutionary anti-colonial leaders who participated in the mass movements for change in the Global South in the 20th century. These movements for independence led to the achievement of liberation for two-thirds of the world’s population from harsh, inhumane white minority rule. The campaign against apartheid in South Africa was part of this anti-colonial struggle.

Mandela shared the vision of such figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharial Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Amical Cabral, Franz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. These leaders were spokespersons for mass struggles that transformed the world in the 20th century.

Third, Nelson Mandela gave voice and inspiration to young people in the Global North who sought peace and justice in their own societies. Mandela inspired movements that went beyond the struggle against racism and imperialism to address sexism and homophobia as well.

Nelson Mandela, c.1950. Photo by Apic/Getty Images.

Fourth, Mandela made it clear to many of us (despite sanitized media frames) that he saw himself as part of the movements of people who themselves make history. He worked with all those who shared his vision of a just society: grassroots movements, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the South African labor movement (COSATU), the Black Consciousness Movement, and progressives from faith communities.

To quote from Mandela’s first speech upon release from prison on February 11, 1990:

On this day of my release, I extend my sincere and warmest gratitude to the millions of my compatriots and those in every corner of the globe who have campaigned tirelessly for my release.

I send special greetings to the people of Cape Town, this city which has been my home for three decades. Your mass marches and other forms of struggle have served as a constant source of strength to all political prisoners.

I salute the African National Congress. It has fulfilled our every expectation in its role as leader of the great march to freedom.

I salute our President, Comrade Oliver Tambo, for leading the ANC even under the most difficult circumstances.

I salute the rank and file members of the ANC. You have sacrificed life and limb in the pursuit of the noble cause of our struggle.

I salute combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe...who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom of all South Africans.

I salute the South African Communist Party for its sterling contribution to the struggle for democracy. You have survived 40 years of unrelenting persecution.

I salute General Secretary Joe Slovo, one of our finest patriots. We are heartened by the fact that the alliance between ourselves and the Party remains as strong as it always was.

I salute the United Democratic Front, the National Education Crisis Committee, the South African Youth Congress, the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses and COSATU and the many other formations of the Mass Democratic Movement.

I also salute the Black Sash and the National Union of South African Students. We note with pride that you have acted as the conscience of white South Africa. Even during the darkest days in the history of our struggle you held the flag of liberty high. The large-scale mass mobilisation of the past few years is one of the key factors which led to the opening of the final chapter of our struggle.

I extend my greetings to the working class of our country. Your organised strength is the pride of our movement. You remain the most dependable force in the struggle to end exploitation and oppression...

I pay tribute to the many religious communities who carried the campaign for justice forward when the organisations for our people were silenced...

I pay tribute to the endless heroism of youth, you, the young lions. You, the young lions, have energised our entire struggle.

I pay tribute to the mothers and wives and sisters of our nation. You are the rock-hard foundation of our struggle. Apartheid has inflicted more pain on you than on anyone else.

On this occasion, we thank the world community for their great contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. Without your support our struggle would not have reached this advanced stage. The sacrifice of the frontline states will be remembered by South Africans forever.

Finally, Nelson Mandela inspired many of us in our own ways to commit to the historical march of people to make a better world. That commitment is powerfully described by a friend, Willie Williamson, a retired teacher from Chicago:

As a young man I learned about Nelson Mandela serving time in prison in South Africa. At that time I was politically ignorant about international affairs, but became curious about the Apartheid racial system because it reminded me so much of the small Mississippi town that I grew up in.

Already angered, after completing a stint in the Vietnam War, I became outraged and somewhat withdrawn. But it was the fight to free Mandela that brought me around to understanding that I had to become a part of a movement with justice at its core. I have Mandela to thank for my understanding of how to relieve an unjust power of its stranglehold. The fight must always be for justice throughout the world!

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 11, Section 1, 1945-1946

Egyptian students demonstrate on February 21, 2012, to mark anniversary of 1946 student and worker uprising. Photo by Mai Shaheen / Ahram Online.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 11: 1945-1946 Period/Section 1 -- Worker and student struggles lead to general strike.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 17, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

A September 1, 1945, report by M. Audsley -- the Labor Counselor at the UK Embassy in Egypt -- indicated what life for most Egyptian workers was like when the leaders of the Egyptian student movement were calling for the formation of a national committee to push for full Egyptian independence from the UK:

The Egyptian workers live in unhealthy and overcrowded dwellings -- they are so overcrowded in many areas that the workers occupy the dwellings in shifts as in a factory; they sleep in the streets and in any odd corner; servants and their families sleep under staircases, in sheds and in gardens or in the more modern buildings which are often not sanitary... Their level of wages is below the subsistence standard... There is no unemployment insurance, no provision for old age and similar state benefits...

Demanding full independence from the UK and the immediate evacuation of all British military forces from Egypt, the Egyptian student movement next called for and organized a massive general strike at a public meeting in Egypt on February 9, 1946, in support of these demands.

Selma Botman described in Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 what then happened on that date in Egypt’s history:

On February 9 [1946] students called a massive strike. They marched by the thousands...from the university grounds in Giza toward Abdin Palace, chanting: "Evacuation! No negotiation except after evacuation!" When they reached the Abbar Bridge, which they needed to cross to reach the palace, they clashed with the police. The police opened the bridge while students were crossing it, causing the deaths of over 20 students by drowning and 84 serious casualties. In protest against the police’s behavior, demonstrations erupted in parts of Mansura, Zagazig, Aswan, Shabiz al-Kom, Alexandria and Cairo...

Then in Cairo, on February 18, 1946, “40,000 demonstrators came together in Abdeen Square while 15,000 others grouped at the university, where pamphlets were distributed attacking British imperialism,” according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988; and “along with these demonstrations, representatives of both the workers and students met and formed the National Committee of Workers and Students [NCWS]....with the aim of leading the struggle against the imperialists and their agents.”

This committee then called for a general strike in Egypt on February 21, 1946, in support of the following three goals:

1. “to struggle for national independence and to combat the military occupation and economic, political, cultural and colonial domination";
2. “to eliminate the local agents of colonialism, i.e., feudalists and big financiers connected with foreign monopolies;” and
3. “to unite all the anti-colonialist nationalist forces to support mass demonstrations and strikes, and to forge contacts with international anti-colonialist democratic movements.”

The NCWS’s February 21, 1946, demonstration and general strike in Cairo began peacefully. But then the Egyptian “protesters were insulted by the behavior of British military personnel” when “several military cars came through the crowds,” according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970; and the British troops next “opened fire” on the Egyptian demonstrators, according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

In response, “demonstrators attacked foreign shops, clubs, and the British military camp” and “at the end of the day, there were 23 dead and 125 wounded,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. The dead Egyptian victims were “given martyrs’ funerals” while anti-imperialist nationalist demonstrations “spread to Giza, Shubra al-Khayma, Bab al-Sharqiyya, Misral-Jadrda, Abbasiyya, Helwan, Port Said, Ismailiya, Zagazig, Mansura, Zift, Mahasla al-Kubra and Tanta,” according to the same book.

The Egyptian student committee then decided to make February 25, 1946, “a day of general mourning for those who had been killed” on February 21; and on February 25, “a general strike took place” during which “clashes with the police led to the deaths of 28” more “demonstrators and the injury of 342” more, as well as “two British soldiers” also being killed and four UK soldiers being injured, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Another day of mourning was held in Egypt on March 4, 1946, to commemorate the additional anti-imperialist nationalist martyrs; and on March 4, 1946, “newspapers were not printed, coffee shops, stores, and factories were closed down, and schools and universities remained silent,” while “clashes in Alexandria left 28 more dead and hundreds wounded,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

When the British government announced on March. 8, 1946, “their intention to evacuate the Cairo, Alexandria, and Delta zones” of Egypt “and set up military camps only in the region of the Suez Canal, the NCWS, with the rest of the [Egyptian] left, took this proclamation as their victory over the forces of imperialism,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 10, 1930-1945

Signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936. Image from Islam Project 2010.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 10: 1930-1945 period -- Anglo-Egyptian Treaty reaffirms Egypt's 'independence' though British domination continues.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

During the 1930s, “Egyptian communist activities...focused primarily on labor unions, continued to be suppressed” by the UK imperialist-backed Egyptian monarchical regime, according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

But in response to both the rise of fascism internationally and the growth within Egypt of Young Egypt, “a paramilitary organization which in the mid and latter 1930s demonstrated admiration for the accomplishments of fascist regimes” in Europe, “antifascist groups...proliferated in Egypt during the 1930s,” according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

In addition, by the late 1930s some “communist study circles” were again formed in Egypt “that evolved into several organizations and factions” by the 1940s, according to an article by Hossam El-Hamalawy that appeared in the MERIP magazine in 2007, titled “Comrades and Brothers.”

Yet in the 1930s Egyptian society was still “socially traditional,” “men and women were generally separated,” “marriages were still arranged” and “women were regarded as the legitimate possessions of men,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Although Islamic law “allowed a woman to own property, conduct business, and inherit a portion of her father’s estate equal to half her brother’s share, it put her at her husband’s mercy in matters concerning divorce and the family,” according to the same book. But despite the social conservatism of Egyptian society in the 1930s, some younger, less traditional Egyptian women did participate in the anti-fascist leftist Egyptian groups of the 1930s.

The UK and Egypt signed an Anglo-Egyptian Treaty on August 26, 1936, which again recognized Egypt as an independent and sovereign nation but “also stipulated...that Egypt must grant Britain...military facilities,” according to Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.  In 1937 the UK government finally “allowed Egypt to apply for membership in the League of Nations and to set up foreign embassies and consulates,” Botman wrote.

But Egyptian leftists in the 1930s considered the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty inadequately anti-imperialist “because British troops were to remain in Egypt for an additional 20 years and because...promises of unobstructed democracy and self-determination were absent,” according to the same book.

The 17-year-old King Farouk -- who inherited the Egyptian throne following the death of his father, King Fuad, in 1936 --  “soon displayed the same autocratic tendencies as his father,” although “the British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson...always referred to Farouk as `The Boy,’ even when the king was in his twenties,” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

After UK ambassador Lampson "surrounded the Abdin Palace with tanks” on February 4, 1942, and “ordered `The Boy’” to appoint as Egypt’s prime minister the particular Wafdist leader that the UK government alone had selected, “or abdicate,” according to A History of Egypt, this “coercion action confirmed that Egyptian independence was nothing more than a sham,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

So, not surprisingly, a new wave of anti-British street protests broke out in Egypt after leaders of the Egyptian student movement met in the summer of 1945 and “decided to call for the formation of national committees to participate in the national movement” of Egypt, according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 9, 1924-1930

Mural shows Saad Zaghlul, first Egyptian prime minister, giving the finger to the military council. Image from Egypt 2011 and Beyond.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 9: 1924-1930 period --The Wafd government and the repression of communists.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 16, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

After an Egyptian constitution was promulgated in 1923, martial law was abolished, an election was held, and Saad Zaghlul, the leader of the Egyptian landowning elite’s nationalist Wafd party, became prime minister in January 1924.

A Wafd government was then formed in Egypt which just “represented bourgeois landowner and upper-class interests and aspirations,” did not represent the interest of Egypt’s “poverty-stricken rural peasants and urban workers,” and “was inherently hostile towards the labor movement” in Egypt, according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

During the 1920s, the plots of arable land owned by 1 million Egyptian peasants were “too small for subsistence,” and “fully one-fifth of rural families” in Egypt “owned no land at all,” according to A History of Egypt.

By late 1924 the Wafd government had interned the entire leadership of the Egyptian Communist Party and disbanded Egypt’s Confederation of Trade Unions.

After 1,200 to 1,500 Egyptian workers had gone on strike in February 1924 at the Filatunes Nationales of Egypt firm in Alexandria -- and workers at Egyptian Oil Industries, Egyptian Salt and Soda Company, Kafr-El-Zayat-Coffon Company, and Abouchanabs had also gone on strike during the same month -- the Wafd government banned gatherings of Egyptian workers, and on March 3, 1924, arrested Egyptian Communist Party leaders such as Hosni al-‘Arabi, Anton Maroun, and Sheikh Safwan Abu-al-Fatah and destroyed the Egyptian Communist Party of the early 1920s.

But “the Comintern put together a new central committee from the remnants of the Egyptian Communist Party” still active “and not imprisoned;” and a new Egyptian Communist Party organization -- "this time more tightly structured, with cells and a private printing press -- was implemented in Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said,” according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

And, as the same book recalled, on March 6, 1925, the Egyptian Communists “acquired a small newspaper, al-Hisab” and “managed to publish” prior to May 18, 1925, “eight issues before it was shut down and its editor and staff jailed.”

Yet “from the first, the organizational meetings of the” reestablished Egyptian Communist Party’s’ “new central committee were infiltrated by British intelligence;” and “an intelligence agent, Mohammed ‘Abd al-‘Aziz,” even “became secretary general of the central committee in late 1924 and served in that post for 4 years,” according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

Not surprisingly, all members of the reestablished Egyptian Communist Party’s Central Committee were arrested by the government after Ahmad Ziwar Pasha succeeded Saad Zaghhoul as the monarchical government’s prime minister on May 30, 1925. But, as Selma Botman observed in The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970, “despite the demise of organized Egyptian communism” during the 1920s, “small pockets of legal leftist activists appeared...some years later...”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 8, 1922-1923

Sultan Ahmad Fuad became King Faud I in 1922. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 8: 1922-1923 period -- Socialist and labor activism flourish despite foreign-dominated monarchy.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 2, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

In 1922 “the British decided unilaterally...to allow Egypt formal independence...because of the realistic possibility that the 1919 Revolution could recur,” according to Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

Yet despite obtaining its formal independence from the UK on February 28, 1922, “Egypt of the pre-Nasser period was dominated by foreigners: the British controlled the upper levels of the military and the government, and people of various European nationalities owned and operated the banks, hotels, textile factories, and insurance companies,” according to the same book.

Although the UK-selected Sultan Ahmad Fuad was now officially the king of a formally independent Egyptian monarchical government in March 1922, the UK government still “retained the right to maintain the security of British imperial communications through Egypt (i.e., the Suez Canal),” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt; and during the next few decades “more than once Royal Navy warships appeared before the palace windows in Alexandria when the British wanted a controversial decision to go their way...”

A "strong British military presence remained in Egypt, not only in the canal zone but also in Alexandria and in Cairo, where the British army barracks stood in the middle of town on the site now occupied by the Nile Hilton Hotel,” and “a British high commissioner...was quite willing to intervene,” according to the same book.

Despite the monarchical government’s censorship policy, during the next few years “between 15,000 and 20,000 workers” in Egypt “were influenced by” the anti-imperialist Egyptian Socialist Party’s labor activism, according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

Party activists mobilized workers, organized meetings, and recruited new members in the Alexandria and al-Mahulah al industrial districts of Egypt; and one of the Egyptian Socialist Party’s founders, Joseph Rosenthal, organized 3,000 Egyptian workers to become members of the General Union of Workers (Itihad al-Naqabot al-‘Am) before being expelled from the Egyptian Socialist Party in December 1922 for opposing the party’s decision to accept the Comintern’s requirements for being affiliated to the Comintern.

Between August 1921 and April 1922, Egyptian workers in 50 different Egyptian workplaces were mobilized to fight for improved labor conditions in 91 separate strike actions. Tram workers in Alexandria went on strike for 42 days, Cairo’s tram workers went on strike for 102 days, and workers at the Shell Oil Refinery in Egypt went on strike for 113 days.

By late 1922, the Egyptian Socialist Party had recruited around 400 members in its Alexandria branch and about 1,100 members in its branches in other Egyptian cities; and the General Union of Workers -- that Egyptian Socialist Party members led -- now had about 20,000 members.

After affiliating with the Third International’s Comintern, the Egyptian Socialist Party then changed its name to the Egyptian Communist Party; and, led by a Central Committee which Hosni al-‘Arabi’ chaired, adopted the following program for the democratization of Egyptian society in its January 1923 meeting:

1. nationalization of the Suez Canal;
2. the liberation and unification of Egypt and the Sudan;
3. the repudiation of all Egyptian state debts and foreign capitulation agreements;
4. an 8-hour workday;
5. equal pay for Egyptian and foreign workers in Egypt;
6. abolition of land tenancy agreements in which Egyptian peasants had to pay 50 percent of the crop on rented land to large landowners;
7. the cancellation of the debts of all Egyptian peasants who owned less than 10 feddans of land; and
8. the restriction of landownership by individual landlords in Egypt to no more than 100 feddans.

To prevent the development of an anti-imperialist leftist movement of workers and intellectuals in Egypt during the early 1920s, however, a "special bureau” had been established by the UK-backed Egyptian Ministry of the Interior in 1921 “to monitor the activities” of the Egyptian Socialist Party; and “in their opposition to socialist activists the British found allies within the Egyptian bourgeoisie and religious circles,” according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

In addition, a Constitution for Egypt, “written by Egyptian legal experts who were sympathetic to the king and the British,” was also decreed on April 19, 1923, which set up an Egyptian Senate and Chamber of Deputies -- with members elected only by Egyptian men, “except for the two-fifths of the Senate who were appointed by the king” of Egypt, according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

This same Egyptian Constitution of 1923 also “gave excessive power to the monarch, who was granted authority to dismiss cabinets, dissolve parliament and appoint and unseat prime ministers,” according to the same book.

And besides holding excessive political power under the April 1923 Egyptian Constitution, “the royal family of Egyptian King Fuad also “owned about one-tenth of the arable land in Egypt” in 1923, according to A History of Egypt. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Egyptian monarchical government’s minister of finance and communications in 1923, Joseph Cattaui, was of Jewish religious background.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Autumn in America, 1973

Lines at New York City gas station, 1973. AP photo. Image from SeattlePI.

Fall 1973:
Autumn in America

Tempers were heating up. The nightly news on WABC usually featured at least one story per broadcast of a fight or sometimes a shooting at a gas station.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 26, 2013

Autumn 1973 was quite the autumn. Personally, I had just moved to New York City to attend college at the Bronx campus of Fordham University. I vaguely recall my first full weekend in New York, checking out the Village and attending a showing of National Lampoon’s production Lemmings at the Village Gate.

Some of the cast members would be household names by 1980: John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Chevy Chase. I smoked a joint during the show and afterwards took the D Train back to the Grand Concourse. The next weekend I met an older woman who invited a fellow dorm resident and me back to her apartment. We drank whiskey and danced.

Perhaps a week after we danced, the Chilean military overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity party. This is exactly what the international Left had feared. Articles regarding the subversion of the socialist Allende government by U.S. corporations IT&T and Anaconda Copper had been running in the Left and underground press for a while. Of course, these corporations were generously assisted by the CIA and the Nixon White House.

I followed the news with an expectant horror. After the generals attacked the palace, I knew it was over. There was a protest outside the UN building in Manhattan where Angela Davis spoke. The numbers attending were pitifully small. Elsewhere in the world tens of thousands protested. Meanwhile, the junta in Chile continued to round up leftists, journalists and others opposed to the coup.

Copper futures rose sharply. On September 25, the great poet Pablo Neruda was buried by his friends after the authorities refused a state funeral and made it illegal for mourners to attend. Thousands did anyhow. His last poem had been smuggled out of the country to Argentina where it was published. The poem lashed out at the authors of the coup in Washington and Santiago, calling the latter “prostitute merchants/of bread and American air,/deadly seneschals,/ a herd of whorish bosses/with no other law but torture/and the lashing hunger of the people.”

Meanwhile, in the football stadium in Santiago, soldiers and other authorities tortured thousands and killed hundreds, including the popular folksinger Victor Jara. Other detainees were held on an island off the Chilean coast. On September 28, the Weather Underground bombed the ITT offices in Manhattan in protest of the coup. Six days earlier, coup architect Henry Kissinger was appointed Secretary of State.

It seemed like only days later that Egypt, Syria, and a couple other Arab armies attacked Israeli military positions. Within days the television was saying that the Soviet Union was threatening to join the fray while Washington was sending an emergency shipment of arms to Israel. Like most wars, this wasn’t exactly a surprise, but the fact that Israel had not pre-empted the attack was at least unusual.

To add to the sense of crisis, the oil-producing nations instituted an oil embargo against the United States and other nations providing arms to Israel (European nations quickly ended their shipments). Even in Manhattan, there were long lines of cars with their drivers waiting to buy their ration of gasoline at every service station.

Like always, the energy industry would profit no matter what happened. So would Henry Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with northern Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. Mr. Tho refused the prize because there was no peace in Vietnam.

In the United States, the situation known as Watergate continued to expand in the way it affected the White House, Congress, and the relationship of the U.S. citizenry to the government. To stave off his critics, Nixon had appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, whose job was to investigate the possibility that crimes had been committed (even though most of the U.S. already knew the answer) and what those crimes might be.

On September 11, 1973, a brutal military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet swept Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende from power. Photo by AFP. Image from BBC.

On October 10, Nixon ordered his Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor. Elliott Richardson, the Attorney General, resigned instead, as did his assistant. However, the man who was third in line at the Justice Department, Robert Bork, carried out Nixon’s order and fired Cox. The shit had barely begun to hit the fan as far as Watergate was concerned.

Thanks to my perusal of several leftist and underground newspapers, I was somewhat aware that students opposed to the military dictatorship of General Papodopoulos in Greece had taken over Athens Polytechnic University. This had followed a series of protests and the conviction of 17 protesters for resistance to authority. The convictions provoked more, larger protests.

After a couple weeks, the army sent tanks through the gates of the university and police chased students off the campus. Around 400 young people died that night and the next day, killed by the authorities. Students continued the protest, while the dictators outlawed numerous student organizations and arrested dozens. Papadopoulos made some efforts to appeal to the students and others opposed to the dictatorship. In response, he was overthrown by another set of military officers opposed to what they saw as a liberalization of Greek society and the protests continued.

A friend from Teaneck, New Jersey, skipped class for a week while he hired himself out to commuters needing gas but not having the time to sit in the growing lines. The price at the pump was slowly creeping up to 59 cents a gallon and rumors of rationing were growing.

Tempers were heating up, too. The nightly news on WABC usually featured at least one story per broadcast of a fight or sometimes a shooting at a gas station. Usually, the incident was provoked because someone jumped in line. Back then, Geraldo Rivera was a local reporter and still had somewhat liberal political leanings. So did a lot of people who would eventually swallow the poison pill offered by Ronald Reagan less than a decade later.

There was an Attica Brigade chapter on my campus. This was a leftist anti-imperialist youth organization connected to the Revolutionary Union, which was one of many organizations arising from the 1969-1970 dissolution of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They were primary sponsors of the first Impeach Nixon rally in New York that fall and inspired a fair number of protesters to attempt a takeover of the Justice Department at another impeachment protest in DC the following April.

Their battle cry was “Throw the Bum Out!” We all know that the bum was eventually thrown out, only to be succeeded by a procession of more bums, some worse but none much better. This is what so-called democracy looks like, although objectively it doesn’t seem much different from the aforementioned colonels’ junta in Greece or the revolving dictatorship in Egypt. We fool ourselves when we pretend that it is.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 7, 1917-1921

Scene from the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. Image from Egyptian History website.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 7: 1917-1921 period -- British oppression leads to nationalist revolution and beginnings of a labor movement.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 20, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Despite the 1882 to 1956 imperial occupation of Egypt by the United Kingdom, until 1914 Egypt was still considered to be a legal part of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. But after Turkey’s Ottoman dynasty rulers -- on October 29, 1914 -- allied with Germany during World War I, “the British declared martial law in Egypt” on November 2, 1914, and “imposed censorship,” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

Then, on December 18, 1914, “the British government severed Egypt’s ceremonial connection with the Turks and declared the country a British protectorate, changing its territorial status and regularizing Anglo control,” according to Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952; and on December 19, 1914, the UK “deposed Abbas Hilmy II” as Egypt’s official ruler “for having `definitely thrown in his lot with his Majesty’s enemies’” and “replaced Abbas with his uncle Husein Kamil, an elderly man, easily managed,” who “was given the title of sultan,” according to A History of Egypt.

But Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 noted how more direct and overt UK imperialist rule after 1914 brought increased national oppression to most people in Egypt:

As World War I progressed, the British became more aggressive in their efforts to control the entire country. In addition to British civil servants who were brought to Cairo to run the bureaucracy, British Empire troops swarmed the larger cities. With the war came high inflation and a degree of hardship that was painful to the majority of the population. In consequence, Anglo-Egyptian hostility deepened... Military authorities forced the peasants to exchange grain, cotton, and livestock for limited compensation.

As A History of Egypt also recalled:

Large numbers of men were conscripted into auxiliary forces such as the Camel Corps and the Labor Corps. Beginning in 1916, desperate for soldiers, the British began drafting Egyptians into the army. The British also conscripted people’s livestock, taking the donkeys and camels that were often necessary for subsistence... The tightness of the British grip on Egypt became glaringly apparent when Sultan Husein Kamil died in October 1917, and the British...altered the terms of succession so that he was succeeded not by his son, who was viewed as anti-British, but by his half-brother Ahmed Fuad...

So, not surprisingly, near the end of World War I an Egyptian “nationalist leader, Saad Zaghlul, with support from the entire country, openly demanded..... that Egypt be allowed to determine [its]own destiny;” and “in November 1918, an Egyptian delegation of nationalist politicians and well-paid notables was formed” -- that “became the nucleus” of the Egyptian landowning elite’s nationalist Wafd party -- “and prepared itself to represent Egypt at the postwar conference in Paris,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

On March 8, 1919, UK authorities in Egypt arrested Zaghlul and his political associates and deported them to Malta. In response to these arrests, according to the same book, the following happened:

Within days, the country erupted in revolt, protesting against the deportation of Zaghlul, the British occupation and Britain’s refusal to allow Egyptian nationalists to represent their country in negotiations to determine Egypt’s postwar status. Students, government employees, workers, lawyers, and professionals took to the streets...demonstrating, protesting... Throughout the country, British installations were attacked, railway lines damaged, and the nationalist movement gained credibility.

And, according to A History of Egypt, “by the time the British rushed in troops and restored order later in the month, more than 1,000 Egyptians were dead from the violence, as were 36 British military personnel and four British civilians.”

Zaghlul and his imprisoned Wafd colleagues were then released on April 7, 1919 -- following what became known as the “Egyptian Revolution of 1919” -- and were now allowed to attend the post-World War I peace conference in Paris to demand political independence from UK imperialism for Egypt. When the Egyptian nationalist leaders arrived, however, in Paris “the American envoy recognized Britain’s protectorate over Egypt;” and “Egypt’s right to self-rule was not established” in 1919, according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

Although Egyptian labor movement activists and workers joined with nationalist businesspeople in making a nationalist Egyptian revolution in 1919, “the revolution did not produce any movement toward labor reform” in Egypt; “and the alliance between labor and the bourgeoisie quickly dissipated," according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

Labor organizer “[Joseph] Rosenthal and Egyptian intellectuals committed to the labor movement -- among the most prominent were Hosni al-‘Arabi, Ali Al’-‘Anony, Salamah Musa, and Mohammed ‘Abdallah ‘Anan -- set out to establish an Egyptian Socialist Party (“al-Hizb al-Ishtiraki al-Misr”) with Egyptian members who would represent the unionized workers,” according to the same book. And in August 1921, they founded the Egyptian Socialist Party.

The Egyptian Socialist Party then opened a party headquarters in Cairo and established branches in Alexandria, Tanta, Shibin al-Kawm, and Mansura. But when the party “applied for a license to publish a newspaper“ it was denied a license “because of its opposition to British and government policy” in Egypt, according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

In its August 28, 1921, program, the Egyptian Socialist Party demanded “the liberation of Egypt from the tyranny of imperialism and the expulsion of imperialism from the entire Nile Valley;” and in a December 22, 1921, manifesto, the party also declared that it would “maintain its socialist program" and would “not renounce the struggle against the Egyptian capitalist tyrants and oppressors, accomplices and associates of the tyrannical foreign domination.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 5, 1879-1890

Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, coined the term "Veiled Protectorate." Painting by John Singer Sargent / National Portrait Gallery, London / Wikimedia Commons.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 5: 1879-1890 period -- Britain rules Egypt under 'Veiled Protectorate.'

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 6, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

As Selma Botman noted in Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952, by 1876 “in essence France and Britain began to control Egypt’s economy,” although Egypt continued to be officially part of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire.

So, not surprisingly, in September 1881, an Egyptian “military officer and Egyptian patriot, Ahmed Urabi, led an anti-government, anti-foreign revolt, directing his protest against both the Turkish pashas, who controlled most civil, military, and social posts...and the Europeans,” according to the same book. And a combined UK and French naval force of gunboats then arrived near Alexandria, Egypt on May 19, 1882, and anchored offshore.

In response, “inflamed popular resentment...exploded in Alexandria on June 11 [1882] in anti-European riots that killed over 2,000 Egyptians and 50 Europeans,” according to Jason Thompson’s History of Egypt. The French government’s naval force then sailed away from Alexandria. But the UK gunboats remained anchored offshore and shelled Alexandria and its residents on July 11, 1882; and, in August 1882, UK troops invaded the Suez Canal Zone and began the UK government’s military occupation of Egypt.

Ahmed Urabi’s troops were defeated on September 13, 1882, by the UK troops, Urabi was exiled to Ceylon/Sri Lanka by the UK government, and the son of Khedive Ismail, Khedive Tewfik (whom the UK government had pressured the Turkish sultan to name in 1879 as Egypt’s local ruler) was allowed to officially govern Egypt until 1892 as a UK puppet, until he was succeeded as the formal Egyptian ruler by Abbas Hilmy II.

But, in actuality, according to The Rough Guide To Egypt, “from 1883 to 1907, Egypt was controlled by the British Consul General, Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, who coined the term `Veiled Protectorate’ to describe the relationship between the two countries.”

A History of Egypt described in the following way how UK imperialism and Lord Cromer operated their “Veiled Protectorate” in Egypt after it was occupied militarily by UK troops in 1882:

Cromer’s official position in Egypt was...British consul general, yet he wielded power that many kings and sultans might have envied. His authority rested on no formal basis. Legally, Egypt was still a province in the Ottoman Empire... The khedive still governed nominally through his ministers, who exercised control over their ministries. In fact, the khedive could be controlled; he knew he owed his throne to the British, and alongside each of the government ministers was a British "adviser" whose advice carried the force of command.

Cromer referred to the arrangement as the "dummy-Minister-plus-English-adviser" system of government... Ministers soon learned that they would lose their posts if they paid no heed to their advisers. The long-serving prime minister during Cromer’s rule, Mustafa Fahmi, was noted for his subservience to the British. Cromer’s position was further strengthened by the presence of a British military garrison nearly 10,000 strong, while the Royal Navy could appear at Alexandria or Suez at any time, and the police forces in the cities were under European command...

The British record in education was atrocious in Egypt... He imposed tuition fees... The British never spent more than 3 percent of the budget on education. They ignored demands for a national university, fearing it would become a center of nationalism…

As Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 observed, the UK “occupied Egypt for both financial and strategic reasons, gaining a decisive voice in all areas of Egyptian life” and the UK imperialist “occupation” of Egypt “lasted until 1956 in various forms.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 4, 1849-1879

Building the Suez Canal. Image from Modern School.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 4: 1849-1879 period -- From free trade and the Suez Canal to bankruptcy and austerity

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 29, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

In 1841 the sultan of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire had “bestowed the hereditary rule of Egypt on Muhammad Ali and his family,” according to Jason Thompson’s History of Egypt. A grandson of Muhammad Ali, Pasha Abbas Hilmy I, succeeded Muhammad Ali as Egypt’s ruler between 1848 and July 1854 -- at which time Abbas Hilmy I was murdered by two of his slaves.

But during his six years as pasha, Abbas Hilmy I “closed the country’s factories and secular schools and opened Egypt to free trade, thus retarding industrialization” of the Egyptian economy, according to The Rough Guide to Egypt.

Following the murder of Abbas Hilmy I, a son of Muhammad Ali -- Pasha Muhammad Said -- ruled Egypt between 1854 and 1863. After coming to power, Muhammad Said gave a concession to build the Suez Canal that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to a childhood friend: a French consul and engineer named Ferdinand de Lesseps.

In exchange for granting the concession to Lesseps and agreeing to provide the Egyptian workers whose labor was required to dig the Suez Canal, Muhammad Said was awarded “personal ownership of 15 percent of the shares of the Suez Canal Company, with another 15 percent going to Egypt” and “through purchase of additional shares, Said’s stake in the company eventually rose to 44 percent,” according to A History of Egypt.

But many of the Egyptian peasants who were conscripted to dig the Suez Canal between 1859 and its completion in 1869 lost their lives while the canal was being built. As the same book recalled:

Some 20,000 peasants were conscripted every month, herded to the canal zone, and put to work. That meant that every month, 20,000 conscript laborers were on their way to the canal zone, 20,000 were actually at work there, and another 20,000 were returning to their homes, so that during the course of a year, more than 500,000 laborers were involved with the canal in one way or another, and this process continued for 10 years.

Working conditions were often horrific; sometimes men had to dig with their bare hands, paid only a pitiful allowance, with barely enough food to sustain them. Dredging machines (paid for by Egypt) were not used extensively until the final phase of work on the canal.

Estimates of how many Egyptian workers died during construction of the Suez Canal vary. According to A History of Egypt:

The number of lives lost from neglect, overwork, malnutrition, or accident has been estimated at the same number as the basic quota of workers: 20,000. Such a large continuing drain on Egyptian manpower at a time when the total population of the country was perhaps 5 million created general economic difficulties... Antislavery societies...strongly objected to what could be considered slave labor...

But according to The Palestine Book Project’s 1977 book, Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People, “over 125,000 Egyptians...died building the canal for the British Empire,” including those Egyptian workers who died of cholera during the 10 years of construction.

After Muhammad Said’s death in 1863, another son of Muhammad Ali named Ismail -- whose status was changed from “pasha” to “khedive” by the Turkish sultan in 1866 after Ismail agreed to pay more money in tribute to the Istanbul government -- became Egypt’s ruler until 1879.

By 1865, “the value of Egyptian cotton exports had risen to a level more than ten times higher” than in 1860, after Europe’s supply of cotton from the South was cut off by the U.S. Civil war, according to A History of Egypt.

But when the value of Egyptian cotton exports decreased by 50 percent in the late 1860s, Khedive Ismail’s government borrowed heavily from mostly UK and French banks and investors to finance Khedive Ismail’s lavish palace lifestyle, his road, bridge, and railroad construction projects, the expansion of his Egyptian army from 25,000 to 120,000 troops, and his attempts to establish more Egyptian control over parts of Sudanese territory to the south of Egypt.

As a result, as the same book observed:

By the mid-1870s, Ismail was desperate. One-third of Egypt’s revenue was going to service the debt. In 1875 he sold his shares in the Suez Canal Company to Britain.....but that exhausted his assets, and his credit had reached its limit. The following year, Egypt stopped making payments on its loans. The country was bankrupt...Ismail had to agree to the formation of a European commission to manage the debt.... Two Controllers, one British and one French, oversaw collection of revenues to make debt payments... They instituted an austerity program of cuts and expenditures that caused widespread hardships…

[Egyptian] Army officers whose pay had been severely cut rioted, probably at the instigation of Ismail... He dismissed the Dual Control... But these initiatives merely convinced France and Britain that Ismail had to go... On June 25, 1879...two telegrams arrived from Istanbul... Ismail learned that he had been deposed and replaced by his 27-year-old son. It had been a fairly simple matter for Britain and France to pressure the sultan to act in the interests of those countries’ bondholders…

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 3, 1805-1849

Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ottoman ruler of Egypt. Painting by Auguste Couder, 1841 / Wikimedia Commons.  

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 3: 1805-1849 period -- The autocratic rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

Nearly two years after Muhammad Ali began ruling the Ottoman Turkish Empire’s Egyptian province, UK troops landed in Alexandria in March, 1807, and attempted to establish a permanent military base in Egypt.

But “when the British sought to extend their control...the result was fiasco” and “many British soldiers were killed” by Muhammad Ali’s troops; and the remaining UK troops in Egypt were compelled to withdraw from Egypt after September 1807, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

Then, according to the same book, in 1811 Muhammad Ali ended the remaining influence of the neo-Mamluk military elite in Egyptian society in the following way:

...Muhammad Ali held a celebration in the Citadel [royal palace] on Mar. 1, 1811... He invited all the principal people of Cairo, including nearly 500 Mamluk amirs. Afterward, as the Mamluks were leaving through the Citadel’s descending Interior Road...they found the exit locked... Sharpshooters [of Muhammad Ali’s loyal troops] appeared on the walls and shot them dead. Another thousand were hunted down and killed in Cairo over the next few days...

Egyptian Pasha Muhammad Ali next confiscated “the vast estates” of the slain Mamluks and the 20 percent of all Egyptian agricultural land that was owned by the religious endowments, or waqfs, and revised the Egyptian tax structure, so that “almost all of Egypt’s land came under state ownership” and he “could decree what to plant, then purchase the produce at a low price set by the state and export it for cash,” according to A History of Egypt.

Instead of just subsistence crops being grown on Egyptian agricultural land, more cash crops that earned foreign exchange -- like the cotton that became Egypt’s major export crop in the years after it was introduced in Egypt in 1821 -- were now grown on the state-owned land; and Muhammad Ali used the foreign exchange income to attempt to modernize Egypt’s economy by “building...factories and canals,” according to The Rough Guide To Egypt.

Muhammad Ali’s public works program of constructing 32 canals, 10 dikes, and 41 dams and barrages with conscripted Egyptian workers brought large amounts of new agricultural land into cultivation. In addition, as a result of his public works program of building factories in Egypt that produced textile, sugar, munitions, ships, and other manufactured goods, “Egypt became the leading industrial nation in the eastern Mediterranean” by the late 1830s, according to A History of Egypt.

By also conscripting Egyptian peasants into his military force, Muhammad Ali increased its size to 250,000 men and used his military force to occupy Sudan in the 1820, and “Egypt became the major military power in the eastern Mediterranean, making Muhammad Ali much stronger than his nominal master, the sultan in Istanbul,” according to the same book.

But after “the pasha became impatient with recognizing the sultan as his master” and “decided to move for independence” for Egypt in 1838, “a British force anchored at Alexandria” in 1839 and compelled him to reduce the size of his Egyptian military and no longer seek Egyptian independence from the Ottoman Empire of Turkey (which the UK government then supported), according to A History of Egypt.

Large numbers of Egyptians who were also drafted to work on Muhammad Ali’s various public works projects, however, lost their lives while working on the canal construction projects. As A History of Egypt,  recalled:

One of the canals, the Mahmudiya, ran for 72 kilometers between Alexandria and the western branch of the Nile. It was constructed between 1817 and 1820 with...labor of as many as 300,000 conscripted workers (of whom between 12,000 and 100,000 are said to have died, according to widely varying accounts)...

And the same book also reported how large numbers of Egyptians suffered under Muhammad Ali’s undemocratic rule and his “modernization” policies:

Muhammad Ali’s accomplishments came at a heavy price to the Egyptian people. The degree of control that the pasha exerted in Egypt was probably unprecedented since ancient times... Every productive strip of land, every palm tree, every donkey, everything that could represent value was assessed and taxed at the maximum it could bear... The people complained incessantly, but they obeyed, for the pasha’s authority was absolute. A simple horizontal motion of his hand meant execution...

Although an “outbreak of bubonic plague in 1834-35 carried away as much as a third of Cairo’s population” during the years that Muhammad Ali undemocratically ruled people in Egypt, according to A History of Egypt, some improvement in Egypt’s health care system was achieved by the end of this pasha’s rule in 1848 (when he became insane) and his subsequent death in August 1849.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'Fire and Flames' is History of German Autonomist Movement

'Fire and Flames':
Spontis, squats, and West Germany

The squats served as living spaces and community meeting places. By 1973, they would become the site of some of the fiercest street battles ever seen in postwar Frankfurt.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2013

[Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo, Introduction by George Katsiaficas, Afterword by Gabriel Kuhn (2012: PM Press); Paperback; 256 pp; $19.95.]

My latest novel is situated in Frankfurt am Main in what was then West Germany (or the Bundesrepublik Deutschland for you German speakers). The time period is 1971-1972 and two of the main protagonists live in a squatted building across from the U.S. military’s Post Exchange.

This squat really existed. In fact, there were several squatted buildings in Frankfurt, especially in the part of the city known as the Westend. The squats served as living spaces and community meeting places. By 1973, they would become the site of some of the fiercest street battles ever seen in postwar Frankfurt. The battles took place because the police had been instructed to take the buildings back by the banks that owned them and the politicians that served those banks.

I mention this because I just finished reading a testament to the movement that grew up in the wake of the early 1970s squatting movement, the demise of the German New Left, and the rise of the West German terror groups like the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction).

This testament, written by a participant in this movement who goes by the name Geronimo, is titled Fire and Flame. Originally published in Germany in 1990, it was translated from the original German in 2012 and published by the left/anarcho PM Press out of Oakland, CA.

The book is a brief survey of the numerous left and anarchist movements that characterized extraparliamentary West German politics in the 1970s until the end of East Germany in 1989. The squats, the red cell groups, the antinuclear movement, the Spontis, the Red Army Faction, and the alternative movement are presented and briefly discussed. In addition to relating stories of actions and events, Geronimo also discusses the politics of the different groups from what can best be termed a libertarian left perspective.

Unlike in the United States, the left libertarian and anarchist groups in Europe tend to have a clear understanding of how capitalism works. Instead of identifying as anti-capitalist without the theory to back that position up, the groups discussed in Fire and Flames (who would become known as Autonomen) usually professed their anti-capitalism in clear Marxist terms.

The areas where the Autonomen differed the most with Marxist organization, whether they were small and cadre-oriented like the Rote Zellen and the Rote Zora, or larger party organizations bearing the term Kommunistische somewhere in their name, was in how they organized. In short, the Autonomen were against leaders and against cooperation with the authorities. They expressed their politics through protest, lifestyle, and attitude. Naturally, this frustrated those with more long term goals.

Fire and Flames is introduced by George Katsiaficas, author of The Global Imagination of 1968 and several other books examining various protest movements around the globe, including his look at the European squatters’ movement of the 1980s.

The choice of Katsiaificas is an intelligent one. His approach to modern social movements extends well beyond a traditional Marxist-Leninist or anarchist understanding. The phenomenon he calls the “eros effect” is similar to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “antisystemic movements.” While incorporating a Marxian analysis of capitalism and its history and its mechanics, both reject the approach to systemic change experienced in previous modern revolutions.

In other words, for these men the vanguardist model is dead. Meanwhile, both consider the changes in consciousness and culture brought on by the events of 1968 (and in Wallerstein’s thesis, 1848 as well) to be intrinsically revolutionary in a perhaps even greater sense than the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century and the Leninist ones of the 20th.

One of the most intense protests I ever attended was in spring of 1973. A German-American friend of mine had introduced me to a squatted set of apartments in the Westend of Frankfurt am Main. The main attraction for me was a small Gasthaus and meeting room on the ground floor of one of the buildings. I would occasionally visit the place to listen to music, drink beer, smoke hash, and maybe talk to a German girl.

That spring there was an impending sense that a showdown with the authorities was coming. The speculators who had purchased the buildings were tired of letting squatters live in them. They wanted to tear them down to build much more profitable office buildings. The Social Democratic city council was ready to cave and the Polizei were ready to kick ass.

I convinced myself that I was ready for whatever happened and took the streetcar to a stop near the protest that April weekend. The fight was already underway when I got off the tram. I lasted perhaps four hours and left when a couple hundred more cops arrived.

This protest was an early part of the movement described by Geronimo. From the squats to protests against nuclear power; from struggles against prison terror to rallies against abortion laws and more. This quick catalog of the West German street movements of 1968-1989 suffers from only one thing: its brevity. Thanks to PM Press for introducing it to the English-speaking audience.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Egypt, Popular Uprisings, and 21st Century Social Movements

Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as a powerful charismatic figure in Middle East politics. Image from The Majalla.

Egypt, popular uprisings, and complexity
of 21st century social movements

On one side are those who remember military coups supported by the United States all around the world. On the other, the case can be made that each rupture in a society must be understood in its own historical context.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2013

Egyptian history

Egypt secured its formal independence from British colonial control in 1922. Nevertheless, the British continued to dominate Egyptian military and political life until 1952 when the “Free Officers” Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a coup that toppled King Farouk, the British man in Egypt.

Following Egypt’s real independence Nasser emerged as a powerful charismatic figure in Middle East politics, seeking to create a zone of  "Arab Socialism.” He established economic and political ties with the former Soviet Union, initiated efforts to construct a “United Arab Republic” with Syria, and militarily opposed former European colonial powers and Israel in reference to control of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the “Six Day War” against Israel in 1967.

Nasser died in 1970 and his successor Anwar El Sadat led the Arab assault on Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Before Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Egypt reversed course, ending ties with the Soviet Union; tilted toward the West; signed the Camp David Accords with Israel under the tutelage of President Jimmy Carter; and began its long-term relationship with the United States, despite anger from the Arab world.

Egypt became one of the major recipients of United States military assistance from 1980 to the present (receiving $1.3 billion per annum). By the 1980s, the Egyptian military gained control of a large portion of the economy of the country. After Sadat’s assassination Hosni Mubarak, the third leader from the military, began his 30-year rule.

Arab Spring, the massive street mobilizations in the Middle East which started in Tunisia in January 2011, quickly spread to Egypt and elsewhere in the region. These revolts had large representations from the working class, youth, and women and others demanding democratization.

As a result of the revolt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011, the military stepped in to replace the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, to stabilize a country on the verge of fundamental social and economic change; established an interim military government; and constructed a new constitution that would mollify protestors, provide for elections, and at the same time would maintain its own institutional power.

Elections were held in 2012 and Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi was elected president. In the year Morsi served as Egyptian president, he declared the presidency’s ultimate power over the courts, used his position to expand the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood over the political system, repressed the 10 percent of the population affiliated with the Coptic Christian Church, stalled efforts to expand the rights of women in Egyptian society, and most recently declared Egypt’s full support of the rebels fighting against the government of Syria.

Two weeks ago a movement of young people calling themselves the rebels (the Tamarrud) circulated a call to rally in Tahrir Square. On June 30, a massive mobilization (some say the largest in modern history) was launched demanding the ouster of Morsi from office. The military issued a statement urging the Egyptian president to achieve some sort of compromise with the protestors and, when he refused, they carried out a coup putting in place an acting president. Subsequent to the coup there have been massive mobilizations in opposition to and in support of Morsi.


Economic context

In a recent article in The Guardian (July 4, 2013), Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, scholar and reporter, discussed the state of the Egyptian economy.

Generally he characterized the Egyptian economic policy embraced at least since the 1990s as involving “structural failures rooted in an unsustainable global model of industrial civilization -- addicted to fossil fuels, wedded fanatically to casino capitalism, and convinced, ostrich-like, that somehow technology alone will save us.”

Ahmed pointed out that oil production has declined by 26 percent since 1996 and a once food sustaining economy now requires the importation of 75 percent of its wheat. Inflation has increased in recent years, particularly regarding the price of food. Egyptian debt constitutes over 80 percent of GDP and the Egyptian government began to institute neoliberal structural adjustment policies in the 1990s. The population has experienced declining safety net policies and generalized programs of austerity as experienced elsewhere in the world.

Meanwhile, financial support of the military remains unchanged. Austerity programs and increased taxes have been designed to get approval for a new $4.8 billion IMF loan. And most critical, “with 40 percent of Egyptians already below the UN poverty line of less than 2 pounds a day, Morsi’s IMF-inspired policies amounted to a form of economic warfare on the Egyptian people.”


What Now?

Debate about the legitimacy of the ouster of Morsi from office has begun to occur within the peace movement. On one side are those who remember, with good reason, military coups supported by the United States all around the world.

The brutality of the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, comes to mind. The Chilean people suffered from a brutal dictatorship leading to thousands of assassinations and people “disappeared,” the end to formal democracy, the crushing of trade unions, and the imposition of a brutal program of neoliberal economic policies that increased economic inequality, reduced the quality of life of most Chileans, and conformed to the dictates of the transnational capitalist class.

On the other hand, the case can be made that each rupture in a society must be understood in its own historical context.

• First, the mobilizations of June 30 can be seen as continuation of a “revolutionary” process that began in 2011 (if not earlier). Many activists at that time argued that the ouster of Mubarak is just the beginning of what will be a long process of societal transformation. They articulated the view that there were no “quick fixes;” that Mubarak, the military, and the rest of the capitalist class were the product of a larger global political economy.


• Second, even though powerful military forces should not in the main be relied on for social transformation, contexts and militaries vary. For example, Hugo Chavez came out of the Venezuelan military and he was saved from a U.S.-engineered coup by his military comrades. Most important in the Egyptian case, the military has dominated Egyptian political life since the Nasser-led ouster of British/American Egyptian puppet, King Farouk. Nasser remained enormously popular with his people until his death. On the other hand, as Democracy Now!’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous points out, the political instability brought on by Morsi’s policies threatened not only his regime but the special status of the military.


• Third, Egyptian history, conveniently forgotten by the media and political pundits, suggests that Nasser led a campaign to create a coalition of secular states, even using the word “socialism” to describe his vision. Even though his vision and practice were flawed, Nasser was one of those first generation of post-colonial leaders supporting what Vijay Prashad called “the third world project.” In other words, he was a secular, radical nationalist. From the 1950s on, ironically, United States policy has often tilted toward supporting “Political Islam,” that is regimes and movements which embrace religious fundamentalism and represent little or no threat to the global political economy. United States funding of Osama Bin Laden in his war against the secular regime in Afghanistan is a glaring example.


• Fourth, political analysts, from academia and the Left, have a fetishized conception of democracy. Democracy as it is conventionally understood is about process. While important, periodically going to a voting booth and choosing between a selection of candidates for public office is only part of a more holistic conception of democracy. Democracy is procedural and it is substantive. In other words, democracy is about choosing candidates and policies and it is also about providing for the fulfillment of human needs. If 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, democracy in the substantive sense is woefully inadequate.


• Finally, what we may call 21st century social movements are spreading all across the globe. Tunisia, Tahrir Square in Egypt, Greece, Spain, Chile, Quebec, the industrial heartland of the United States, and occupiers everywhere constitute a new politics that only partially conform to traditional models of mobilizing for social change. Indeed we celebrate the mass movements for the eight-hour day, the right of industrial workers to form unions, poor people’s campaigns, anti-war mobilizations, and public campaigns to save the environment.

The historic role of socialist organizations and visions remains critical to 21st century social transformations. But the programmatic character of contemporary mobilizations; the inspirational connectivity of movements across borders, classes, genders, and races; and the recognition by participants that each is part of a historic process may be somewhat new.

Social movements today often see the need to “compromise” with institutions such as the military to advance the condition of the people. At the same time, as the movement in Egypt suggests, they remain mindful of the limitations of alliances of convenience.

Therefore, there are lessons from Egypt for the peace movement in the United States. Peace activists should analyze moments of instability and change in their historical, economic, cultural, and political complexity. They need to assess specific situations to understand which social forces are more likely to represent the values that they support.

Then in each concrete case they should ask how activism in the United States can best support the just struggles of 21st century social movements.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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