Cairo, where the road to Gaza ends

Mada

06-07-2025

Over the past weeks, at least three international protest actions have taken shape in solidarity with Gaza, each marked by its own calculus of strategy, visibility and privilege [1]. From the Freedom Flotilla Coalition's latest mission, Madleen, to the Global March to Gaza, and the Sumud Convoy mobilizing across the Maghreb, these efforts reflect different manifestations of what it means to 'stand with' Palestine, 20 months into Israel's genocide in Gaza.
As these mobilizations grow louder, so do the questions they provoke: What kinds of solidarity gain visible traction, and which don't? And what does that visibility actually yield for Palestinians, beyond awareness? Does it translate into material relief or political pressure? Who gets to act and on whose terms?
These efforts emerge from a place of grief, outrage and an urgent sense of responsibility to act — one shared by people across the world. Yet intention alone is not strategy. This is not a critique of action, but of misrecognition, of how Palestine is too often rendered a stage for symbolic protest, where international visibility is mistaken for political leverage. That visibility may generate headlines, but rarely does it shift conditions on the ground. These forms of protest rely on the logic that Western presence can confer credibility, untouchability, and superiority in the hierarchy of mobilizations.
None of this is to question the sincerity or commitment of those involved. The impulse to act — especially amid Western and Arab silence and complicity — is vital. But how, where, and with whom we act must reflect more than outrage or the comfort of a clear conscience; it must be grounded in political responsibility. Anything less is bound to collapse into feel-good activism. The march is heavily documented, livestreamed, and optimized for virality, but in doing so, the complexity of the terrain it moves through is flattened. There remains a failure to recognize that not all forms of solidarity fit within a frame.
In the weeks leading up to the March to Gaza, I received near-daily messages. Some, mixing enthusiasm and urgency, asked whether I planned to join the convoy. Others simply wanted to hear my thoughts. I hadn't been following the march's official communications closely. Based on the stillborn precedents of the past 20 months — and the 2009 Gaza Freedom March — I had little doubt the convoy would be blocked, if not violently intercepted, before reaching Sinai. That near certainty made it difficult for me to hold high expectations for the initiative.
The Gaza Freedom March of 2009 was a large-scale international mobilization organized following one year of Israeli assault on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Over 1,300 activists from more than 40 countries gathered in Cairo, intending to march alongside Palestinians in Gaza against the blockade. The initiative called not only for lifting the siege but also for international accountability. At the time, Egypt, citing security concerns, had aligned itself with the Israeli-imposed blockade and closed the Rafah crossing in response to Hamas becoming the de facto governing authority in Gaza in 2007. Yet from the moment activists arrived, the Egyptian government, under Israeli pressure, refused to allow the convoy to proceed.
Travel permits were revoked, border access shut down, and major public gatherings banned. Instead of reaching Gaza, protesters were met with riot police and blockades in Cairo and Arish. In defiance, activists staged sit-ins, vigils, hunger strikes, and flash demonstrations across the city, from embassy fronts to public squares, often improvising symbolic actions in the face of sweeping restrictions. While a small number of aid delegates were eventually allowed to cross, the majority were prevented from leaving Cairo.
This history matters because it offers a precedent of state repression that has remained intact across regime change, especially in its stance toward Palestine solidarity, where there has been no rupture, only continuity. Fifteen years later, it is difficult to imagine how a march of this scale could expect a different outcome without a radically different political strategy — one that recognizes Egypt not as a neutral transit point but as a political site where authoritarian rule and regional complicity are deeply intertwined. To protest in Egypt without reckoning with how its normalization with Israel and suppression of dissent are mutually sustaining is to overlook the broader colonial condition in which both Egypt and Palestine remain entangled. Egypt's role is not that of a passive bystander but an active gatekeeper in the siege on Gaza, shaped by regional alliances and international pressure to manage Palestine as a security threat rather than a political struggle. Egypt's role must also be understood within a broader Arab regime consensus that frames Gaza not as a site of liberation, but as a destabilizing force to be neutralized. From normalization agreements to security coordination with Israel, Egypt — like many Arab states — has positioned itself as a broker of containment. What the march was up against was not simply a matter of borders or permits, but a regional order in which the Palestinian cause is inconvenient at best and criminalized at worst.
Reading the official statement issued by the March to Gaza gave me pause, not to doubt logistics, but to question the framing. Presented as 'apolitical and peaceful,' the march framed the response to Israel's genocide in Gaza as a humanitarian gesture rather than a direct confrontation with a political polycrisis rooted in settler colonialism. Though it may be employed for strategic, even conciliatory purposes, the framing misjudges the stakes of the present and ends up reproducing the impunity it claims to oppose. By casting Gaza solely as a humanitarian crisis, the march decenters the political subjectivity of Palestinians themselves, turning them from agents of struggle into objects of solidarity.
The initiative relies on volunteerism and mass turnout as a substitute for political coherence, which encourages participation based on presence alone, rather than shared political grounding, affiliations, or responsibilities. In that context, even well-meaning mobilizations can become diffuse and depoliticized, defined more by optics than intention.
The introduction of uncoordinated international protest or mutual aid, without understanding or deference to local actors, threatens to unravel the support systems that have been painstakingly built under pressure. Local organizers have sounded the alarm for weeks, pointing out not only the logistical but also the political missteps. That these warnings were dismissed speaks to a broader pattern of extraction masked as solidarity, driven by entitlement rather than humility.
Privilege often structures how risk is distributed within global solidarity movements. The visibility and symbolic weight of certain activists — particularly those with Western passports, lighter skin, and media fluency — are not incidental; they reflect how the empire continues to shape who is heard and who is hurt.
That's precisely what the organizers of the March to Gaza were counting on: descending on Cairo by the thousands and strong-arming their way toward Rafah with moral urgency, but with little strategic foresight — relying on tactics that may have worked elsewhere, but fail to account for the authoritarian terrain they've parachuted into.
The contingency plan was to escalate by urging embassies to intervene, launching hunger strikes, or generating what they imagined would be 'unprecedented pressure' and a blow to Egypt's international image. The 'embassy strategy' that relies on pressuring diplomatic missions to take action only reinforces this logic. It instrumentalizes Western power, feeding into the same white supremacist backdrop of liberal democracies that remain complicit in the genocide.
The dynamics of the white savior complex become especially visible when international activists arrive in Cairo without the necessary legal authorization, assuming that their presence or passport will shield them from repercussions. Legally speaking, most countries — including those in Europe — require permits for protest, often limited to designated routes and specific time slots, and Egypt is no exception. Without them, organizers face detention or arrest. But this is not just any protest — it's one unfolding in close proximity to an active 'war zone,' where political sensitivities are exponentially heightened. What sets this context apart is not the law itself, but how it is enforced and against whom. Here, the margin for error is far smaller, the stakes significantly higher, and the consequences fall disproportionately on Egyptians and displaced Palestinians, including those only tangentially involved, not on foreign visitors who retain the option to leave once the consequences become real.
This is not just a matter of poor judgment or misplaced idealism. These protest tactics emerge from, and often reproduce, a white supremacist logic: the assumption that international, especially Western, presence can override or bypass the structures of violence that others must navigate, precisely because those structures were never designed to constrain them. It is the same logic that upholds a world where some bodies are presumed to matter more than others, and some misguided steps are survivable only for those who can afford them. When whiteness functions as a passport to disruption without consequence, the outcome isn't just political dissonance, but rather structural harm.
Worse still, this approach shifts the burden of redress to states in the global south, placing heightened expectations on non-Western governments for visible action, even as many of the same activists have challenged their own states' complicity through demands for arms embargoes, divestment, and political pressure.
This holds true for the organizers of the march, who are stepping into a political terrain that extends beyond their experience, familiarity, or capacity — often respond with visible shock when the Egyptian state acts with the same consistency as it always has: with repression, surveillance, and zero tolerance for dissent.
The absence of widespread Egyptian participation in the march has, unsurprisingly, triggered a fringe backlash online. From demands that 'Egyptians [Must] Rise Up, or Step Aside' to broad-stroke critiques shaming Arabs for not protesting at Rafah, these reactions flatten the conditions on the ground and ignore how protest visibility operates differently depending on who is seen. In Egypt, visibility is not symbolic; rather, it is incriminating. To protest is not to make a statement, but to accept the likelihood of state surveillance, forced disappearance, or imprisonment for life.
There is a real emotional and political toll to being asked to bear the cost of regional redemption. Egyptians know what solidarity looks like. What they reject is being called complicit for refusing to walk into a minefield drawn by others. To judge their solidarity with the Palestinian cause solely by their willingness to join a tactically incoherent protest — with no leverage and near-certain failure from the outset — is not only shortsighted, but steeped in entitlement. It reflects a deeper failure to recognize the asymmetry of risk and the right to refuse imposed sacrifice.
There is also a fundamental strategic dissonance at play. In cities like New York or London, anti-Zionist Jewish blocs protest visibly as a political tactic: their visibility disrupts dominant narratives and offers symbolic protection. But when protest is exported into hyper-securitized contexts, where visibility can lead to direct harm rather than media traction, calls for equal participation fundamentally misread the scene. Solidarity, in such settings, is not about uniform visibility; it is about differentiated responsibility.
While some are able to sail boats and garner international headlines, Palestinians and Arabs are brutalized for crossing checkpoints, organizing protests, or holding a banner. The disparity is not about effort or commitment but access and audibility. The price of protest is not evenly distributed, and we must not confuse visibility with sacrifice. Too often, we hear the language of 'putting bodies on the line,' as if crossing a border with embassy backing is equivalent to facing a military regime without the privilege of exit. To center solidarity on the most privileged actors is to erase those who move against the grain without safety nets — where it's not just freedom of assembly or speech at stake, but freedom itself.
What's needed is not romantic appeals to sacrifice, but a clear-eyed distinction between state policy and popular will, between regimes and those who live under them.
This isn't about discouraging international solidarity, but about naming the disparity between activists who face deportation and those who face indefinite disappearance. It's a disparity that Egyptians and Palestinians alike have been repeatedly warning of, and often ignored. The figure of the Western martyr arrives in the region — placing their body 'on the line' in distant lands — armed with abstract ideals, convinced that their physical presence is, in itself, an act of transformation. Such acts of solidarity often assume that resistance is universal and easily transferable, overlooking the fact that the stakes are deeply uneven and context-specific.
It's worth asking: who, ultimately, benefits from the momentum, ambiguity, and hypervisibility these actions generate? Certainly not displaced Palestinians, who face greater scrutiny. Nor Egyptians, who risk reprisal for actions not of their making. Meanwhile, the plight of Palestinians trapped and starving in Gaza is pushed to the margins, as headlines shift to focus on foreign activists clashing with Egyptian riot police. When solidarity collapses into performance, it's rarely those at the center of the struggle who reap its rewards.
This is not to dismiss the march or the solidarity it reflects. It's a call to sharpen it, to act with greater clarity, humility, and care. Because if we believe Gaza deserves more than silence, then it also deserves more than spectacle.
True solidarity doesn't begin with gatekeeping or grandstanding. It begins with deep listening, trust-building, and a commitment to minimize harm and uphold dignity. If we are serious about standing with Palestine, we must let go of the fantasy that visibility alone will break the siege. What's needed now is not more bodies at borders, but a politics grounded in coordination, consent, and accountability, to those in whose name the action is taken, and to those who bear the most significant burden.
Solidarity is not about being seen doing the work, it is about knowing when to step back, listen, and follow the lead of those already risking everything. In contexts shaped by fear, fragmentation, and decades of state violence, to intervene without deep understanding or invitation — however well-intentioned — is not solidarity, it is disruption.
In moments like this, solidarity must move beyond presence or performance. It must be rooted in coordination with those more directly affected, humility to listen rather than lead, and a clear-eyed reading of the terrain — not as a blank canvas for symbolic action, but as a charged and often dangerous landscape where the stakes are not theoretical, and where Palestinian dignity, not just suffering, must remain central. That means asking questions, paying close attention, and plotting alongside local organizers, not over or around them. It means asking before offering, being receptive before acting. It means offering support quietly rather than performatively and centering actions around impact rather than optics. It means stepping back when needed, not out of passivity, but out of responsibility.
There's something deeply seductive about collective movement — about being part of a moment that feels historic. But that feeling, too, can be a kind of privilege: to experience solidarity as a high, without having to live its aftermath. What does it mean to hold that emotion alongside a politics of responsibility?