Sailing for Freedom

The word activism has taken a whole new dimension since the January 25 Revolution due to the country’s shifting political state. From cyber activism to marches and million-man protests, it feels as if we have seen it all. But for one woman, revolutionary activism does not stop in Egypt. Lina Attalah, the managing editor of Egypt Independent, the English-language sister publication of Al-Masry Al-Youm sees the Palestinian issue, with the Gaza blockade and unjust occupation of the Palestinian lands, going hand in hand with Egypt’s movement. The shared border only makes the cause more pressing. “I see it as part of what we are going through, part of our revolution,” says Attalah. “This border that is separating us — and its closure, which is a very abnormal thing — is only the product of the […] regime that we are still in the process of toppling. It is part of our revolution.” Attalah has been involved in Palestinian activism for the past 10 years, but last November she took it to another level by joining the “Freedom Waves” flotilla, a two-boat mission carrying aid to Gaza, in an attempt to challenge the Israeli blockade imposed since 2007. After departing from Turkey, the boats were intercepted by the Israeli Navy in international waters, around 15 nautical miles from Gaza. Attalah and the other participants were detained and sent to the Israeli port of Ashdod. “It didn’t take long before I was put in a car, an Egyptian diplomatic car with two Egyptian diplomats, and I was taken to the Egyptian border of Taba. And that’s the end of the story,” says the journalist. She recalls that throughout her interrogation by Israeli officials, she was told that she shouldn’t worry as she would be deported to Egypt very soon — a situation she says is “symptomatic of the stronger political ties between Egypt and Israel now.” Advocating for Palestine During her years as a journalism student at the American University in Cairo, Attalah was a very active advocate for Palestine. She was part of a student project called Cairo to Camps, where delegations of Egyptian and other Arab activists went to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan to express solidarity proactively. “It was also to maintain how crucial it is for our youth to meet with Palestinian youth, be they refugees or Palestinians living inside the occupied territories,” says Attalah. “An exchange has to happen and has to live.” Throughout her journalism career, she has kept Palestine in the media spotlight, covering the 2000 Intifada and reporting about aid trucks being sent from Egypt, among other issues. She attempted to go to Gaza in 2005 but wasn’t allowed to cross the border; instead she was detained for 24 hours by the Israeli authorities. “I think that part of wanting to go, be it on my own or as part of a collective, is turning this state of non-action into action,” she explains. “[It’s about] demystifying Palestine — stop thinking about it as the land of olives and all that and actually going there, being with the people there.” Attalah has followed the international solidarity movement of aid flotillas very closely. After one flotilla was blocked from leaving Greece in July 2011, Attalah started an editorial campaign on Al-Masry Al-Youm’s English website calling for the flotillas to use Egypt as a departure point. While she believes it could be a solution to the problems flotillas face in European ports, she realizes there would be other difficulties because of Egypt’s ties with Israel. Aid flotillas have not yet looked to Egypt, but Attalah says her campaign succeeded in raising awareness about the issue. Noting Egypt’s history supporting the Gaza blockade with the Rafah border crossing, she says her campaign was also an attempt to test how far the revolution has reached in terms of Egypt’s relationship with Palestine. In her many interviews with international solidarity movement organizers and her public awareness campaign, Attalah has long emphasized that there need to be more people from the revolutionary Arab world involved, especially from Egypt given these additional layers of shared borders and Arab nationalism. Her efforts paid off when the Freedom Waves organizers invited her to join their flotilla. “It was an awesome opportunity, because not only does it respond to my interest and my passion in the Palestinian cause,” she says, “but it also responds to my passion about the sea, which has been a conceptual interest in many ways.” Riding the Waves of Freedom Unlike other flotilla campaigns, the Freedom Waves organizers were very careful not to publicize the mission in advance, not only to avoid sabotage attempts but also to avert attention from the actual mission at hand, breaking the naval blockade of Gaza. Attalah says the participants couldn’t talk about the details of the trip, and up until the very last minute the departure port was unknown. “We would only announce to the world that we are headed to Gaza once we were in international waters,” Attalah says. “This is an interesting point because international waters, those are everyone’s, they speak to nation states, they speak to borders, they are like the contesting point to the modern nation-state model. Nobody can stop us once in international waters.” The Irish ship Saoirse and the Canadian ship Tahrir, which included Attalah and about 20 other activists and journalists, departed from a port in southern Turkey called Fatiha, with organizers telling authorities that they were part of a holiday cruise heading to Crete. Only when they reached international waters did they announce their mission to Gaza. During the three-day trip to reach Gaza, Attalah filed a series of articles for the English and Arabic editions of Al-Masry Al-Youm, attempting to reach as many people as possible. While she focused on sending messages to the world about the mission Attalah says that other people were making signs and banners in preparation for the moment when they reached Gaza. As they approached within 80 nautical miles of Gaza, the activists started thinking that interception was very imminent. Previous aid flotillas to Gaza had been intercepted by the Israeli Navy as far as a 100 nautical miles away from Gaza, well within international waters. “So we expected the interception and kidnapping to happen at night, which is a little bit scary,” says Attalah. When morning came, however, nothing had happened. Attalah remembers that as the ship was approaching 15 nautical miles from Gaza, she told herself that this was really happening, they would actually make it. “But that was naïve,” the journalist admits. Shortly afterward, they saw “four big Israeli naval ships surrounding us from very far. I could hardly see them until they got me [binoculars].” Within an hour the sea around them was swarming with Israeli boats. “I started seeing other boats, zodiacs, water cannons, and they were getting very close to us. This is the time where we lost our communication signals completely so we lost connection to the world.” But the Freedom Waves mission had already managed to send word of their interception across the globe. As the Israeli naval vessels closed in on the two Freedom Waves boats, the Israelis sent radio messages asking about the destination of the boat and informing them that the area was legally prohibited and they would take them to the Israeli port of Ashdod as “illegal” migrants. “The idea behind the boat’s activism is peaceful resistance, we were not going to say ‘Yes, please come,’” Attalah recalls. “We kept resisting with words, we started showing the signs [that said] ‘This is piracy, you don’t have the right to kidnap people in international waters.’” The confrontation escalated when the Israeli navy started spraying the boats with water cannons. Attalah recalls the sea was getting rough and the boat’s deck was becoming very slippery. The Saoirse lost control for a few minutes because of the water cannons and it hit the Tahrir. “They hit our boat, the front side of the deck was destroyed, and that is all in the middle of the water, so they put us in a very dangerous situation,” says Attalah. “I was terrified when the other boat hit us. I thought that we were all going to sink.” Shortly after, the Israeli navy managed to board the two ships and take control, sailing the ship toward Ashdod. The crew and passengers were ordered at gunpoint to get on their knees. “It was very scary because there were plenty of these Israeli soldiers, masked and holding lots and lots of guns, and the sight of guns is so disturbing in many ways,” says Attalah. After the Freedom Waves activists were all seated on the lower deck of the boat, each one was then allowed to collect his or her belongings with an Israeli officer. Attalah recalls the experience as quite annoying and disturbing, as she found all her electronic equipment destroyed and an Israeli boatman sleeping on her sleeping bag — she had to insist he get off and return it to her. In Ashdod, the activists were separated from each other, strip-searched, interrogated and had their things confiscated. Attalah recalls being very annoyed that her captors kept her personal diary and books, but perhaps Attalah’s most poignant moment was as she was being strip-searched and heard flotilla organizer David Heap scream out the names of each person on the boat. It was as if he was taking attendance, she says, “a gesture […] that we are here, we are all together. It was a very moving moment — he was calling out names in a deserted detention facility, and no one was answering him at all.” Activist, Journalist and Artist Intense as it was, this trip to Gaza was the first time she deployed a tangible form of activism in challenging the Gaza blockade. Although the interception by the Israeli Navy was rough, Attalah still thinks that she is more challenged and more worried when she is covering the revolution and the violent clashes in Cairo. “The moments of fear are much more imminent for me when I am in Egypt, and that has to do with the complexity of Cairo being my hometown, which should be synonymous with a sense of security and feeling protected and all of that, but it’s not,” she explains. “I am much more emotional, I must say, and disturbed and fearful in the most recent incidents of violence in Cairo.” Her experience with the flotilla has added much to her activism, as she was able to empirically witness how an occupier acts and gain greater understanding of the police state of Israel. “We need to keep doing stuff. We need to keep unsettling the state of occupation, even by small symbolic acts, or a march headed to Gaza, to the border,” Attalah says. The activism has to continue and has to be activism in the sense that it is proactive — it calls to action.” Besides being a passionate activist on Palestinian issues, Attalah is also an artist and has worked on several cultural and artistic projects. She is one of three curators on the Contemporary Image Collective’s Take to the Sea research archive, which explores the sea as a cultural, political, legal and socioeconomic territory. Meanwhile, her journalism career is presenting new challenges and opportunities. After launching the first print edition of Egypt Independent in November, Attalah halted the publication over issues of “self-censorship.” She is in the process of getting Egypt Independent its own print media license, while at the same time overseeing the online daily news content. “Our jobs develop our personalities through every intense experience, I feel I am developing a personality,” she says. “ I think the moment our experiences stop unsettling us because they are ‘business as usual’ is the moment when we become voyeuristic journalists who have no stake in what they are covering.”