Description
This paper looks at the way two movements in solidarity with Palestine themselves laid the groundwork for (supposedly unrelated) revolutionary moments in their domestic contexts. It asks how political imaginaries born out of contention in extreme repressive contexts can produce other possibilities and major unintended ramifications, using the case studies of Egypt and Syria. In September 2000, upon the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada, protests in support of the embattled Palestinians broke out across the region in ways rarely seen before. The Mubarak regime in Egypt, having deployed extreme repressive measures against Islamists and civil society actors in the 1990s, was advised by the Clinton Administration to allow some protest as a pressure valve, while Syria’s newly anointed President Assad was allowing a tentative opening in civic activism, with demonstrations for Palestine deemed a tolerable form of public expression. Neither knew these were to sow the seed of the revolts that broke out a decade later, with activists cutting their teeth building the demonstrations, forging ties of solidarity, testing the limits of what was possible in the public sphere, and developing repertoires of contention. This paper asks what implications there are for analysing protest as worldbuilding, even when the world is decades delayed and even hidden (from the participants themselves) – where solidarity creates new possibilities and demands domestically.
