Has the Palestinian Cause Taken a Backseat Among Youth?
By: Mohamed Youssef
@MAboussef
Egyptian youth have traditionally felt a kinship with the Palestinian struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation, and strongly supported statehood.
They have marched in protest of Israeli military action in the West Bank and Gaza and called on world governments to pressure Israel to halt what they say are humiliating human rights abuses of millions of Palestinians.
In early May, Egypt mediated to end violence between Hamas and Israel which left four Israelis and 25 Palestinians dead.
Among the Palestinian dead were pregnant women, children and infants.
There was palatable anger among young Egyptians on social media, but in the streets, few knew of Hamas firing homemade rockets and Israeli warplanes bombing the tiny Gaza enclave.
“Right now do I notice apathy towards Palestine, not just towards Palestine but political apathy? Yes, maybe. I don’t know if it’s lack of awareness, because for me I don’t understand when people are aware of what is happening on the ground yet choose to be silent,” explained Hiba Belhadj, a political science student and co-organizer of Israeli Apartheid Week.
She believes that some people are feeling a sense of hopelessness toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
However, Israeli Apartheid Week – a well-known movement across higher learning institutions all over the world that raises awareness about Israel’s Apartheid and encourages participants to contribute to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement – is steadily growing.
The BDS movement aims to pressure Israel to comply with international law through encouraging boycott of Israeli international companies, calling for entities to withdraw their investments from Israeli enterprises in a bid pressure governments to ratify sanctions against Israel and pressure the Israelis to implement UN resolutions.
Since its inception in 2005, hundreds of musicians, politicians and Israeli activists and scholars have joined to commemorate the Week and support BDS.
Nevertheless, Belhadj sees a shift in how the Palestinian issue is currently being addressed and therefore acknowledges a change in the attitude of young Egyptians to what is happening in Palestine.
Mouannes Hojairi, history Professor at AUC, believes that there were critical factors in Egypt’s recent past which helped galvanize Arab youth against Israel and maintain near unanimous support for Palestinians.
Principally, he says, having a state-sponsored nationalist agenda which integrated the Palestinian cause at its core helped keep the issue of Palestine at its forefront.
Egyptian youth could not be excluded from the nationalist discourse in support of the Palestinian cause, given that this discourse had cemented its position in Egyptian thought and popular culture.
“From the inception of the state of Israel, Egypt played a leading role in supporting Palestinian rights, being involved directly in a war with the state of Israel and actual support for the Palestinians. This was not in opposition to Egyptian popular support,” said Hojairi.
He says that youth today have not been exposed to the notion of Arab Nationalism – as espoused by the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – which encompassed the Palestinian cause at its core.
“When I was a student growing up in Egypt, the question of Palestine was a central one. It wasn’t a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it was an Arab-Zionist conflict. It wasn’t a religious conflict, it was a conflict against a colonial settler state. There was no question about it – Israel was the enemy,” said Mahmoud El Lozy, theater professor at AUC and ardent supporter of Palestine.
He says that Egyptian youth have become apathetic about the Palestinian cause.
“Egyptian youth have apathy towards everything… They have no consciousness, no knowledge of the past, no projection of the future and they live in a tale of the present,” said El Lozy added.
On April 3, the Department of Arts and the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication screened Killing Gaza, a documentary film made by journalists and filmmakers Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen about the Israeli War in Gaza in 2014.
But many AUCians were unaware that according to the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict, over 2000 Palestinians were killed and more than 11,000 were injured. Most of those injured were civilians.
After the screening, Alaa El Sayed, a graduate student said that the Palestinian cause may be discussed in political and economic terms but what is happening on the ground is unknown.
“I believe, we as Egyptians, have drifted away from the Palestinian cause,” El Sayed added.
El Lozy says that young people may not be as concerned about Palestine as previous generations because of what he says is a vast propaganda campaign to demonize Palestinians following the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Deal.
Architecture senior Kareema Hamdy says she is not up to date with what is happening in Palestine, and feels helpless to do anything about the violence there.
“I would rather live in blissful ignorance than to acknowledge certain issues that may not affect my life,” she said.
But Hojairi says that while some of the conditions and factors which led young adults to support the Palestinian cause in the 20th Century have since diminished in influence, new ones are emerging to stimulate passions about Palestine.
“Support for the Palestinian cause doesn’t necessarily have to be on the level of nationalism. Nowadays, support is more often among the discourse of rights, as in you are not pro-Palestinian state but you want rights for Palestinians. It’s an issue of human rights violation,” added Hojairi.
The Caravan conducted a survey of 51 students gauging AUC awareness of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Some 68.6 percent said they were concerned about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but only 31.4 percent were aware that Israeli Apartheid Week was taking place.
“I think it’s really important to bring back the Palestinian narrative on campus and to bring back the Palestinian cause… I think it is really important to have a faculty-student alliance for Palestine,” said Belhadj.
The faculty-student alliance is to a large extent what the AUC Justice for Palestine (AUC4JFP) is about. It is an informal group of student, alumni and faculty that aims to make sure that the university actively participates in the Palestinian cause.
