View from the Middle — Silencing Discussion

Unlike most Cornell students, I have witnessed the current debate on the Gaza conflict and the vandalism controversy from abroad. Based on the fragments I can understand from friends and The Sun, it looks as though we are confronting a set of issues much broader than ourselves, but in which we are nevertheless implicated. I want to provide the perspective of a student who cares deeply about our campus politics vis-à-vis the Middle East — but who is currently in the region.

I am studying at the American University in Cairo. The university itself is moving its campus to the elite suburbs of New Cairo, and last Saturday night I arrived home to see a handful of students watching a televised Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s first lady, celebrate the inauguration of the new campus. In impeccable English, she declared:

“It is imperative that we work astutely with young people to address comprehensively the social, natural, cultural and ethnical contracts of our times. We need to prioritize securing human rights, from food to peace and to diversity. We must do more to promote dialogue and understanding across our nations, and highlight our common values and aspirations.”

Yet on Sunday morning, campus swarmed with flyers and a general buzz about Philip Rizk: an AUC graduate student who had recently been abducted by state security forces. Rizk had spent extensive time in Gaza and he was protesting the Egyptian government’s position in the conflict when he was whisked away to an undisclosed location, without charges of any sort.

Several poorly attended demonstrations ensued on campus, demanding both Rizk’s release and increased transparency of Egypt’s role in the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Philip was freed, and yet little has really changed in terms of the larger picture. At every moment, any of us at AUC are potential targets of illegal detention because we engage in the Israel-Palestine discussion.

The paradox of Suzanne Mubarak as the soft face of dictatorship has been instructive. My initial temptations to ascribe this situation to an easy binary in which America is a “free country” and Egypt is a “Middle Eastern dictatorship” have not been satisfying. I couldn’t help but feel that the university’s failure to adequately criticize the government is part of a larger dynamic, wherein Egypt’s human rights abuses, Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip and American support of both are all bound together — with AUC and students like me awkwardly positioned in the middle.

When a school that has “American” in its name allows Mubarak to invoke American notions of freedom in its mission statement, how is it then implicated in actions like Rizk’s abduction? How are we as Americans implicated? What is our obligation to voice what our government supports abroad? What does our freedom within the U.S. demand that we do in regard to Israel and Palestine? My only answer was to write this article, and my ambivalence is excruciating.

Fresh off the Philip Rizk controversy, I became aware of Cornell campus’ issues concerning Gaza and Israel. I understand the flags, which symbolized all of the deaths in the conflict less as an ideological position and more as a call to discussion. The flags help show what is at stake in an endless banter about the Palestinians, the Israelis and the American government — that is, thousands of human lives.

Although it was on a much smaller level, the violence of the vandalism felt like an eerie parallel to the silencing of criticism that happens on an institutional level over here in Egypt. When Navid Farnia ’09 wrote in a letter to The Sun that “the dominant group feels a need to approve of any action ... when a minority group wants to accomplish anything of substance,” it was simply about the way in which the display’s organizers have been implicitly blamed for the vandalism. Yet, to me, it sounded a lot like Egypt’s treatment of dissenters. I don’t want to pretend that we are anywhere near the institutional violence present in Egypt, but it is a slippery slope between the mild and the massive when it comes to free speech.

There can be an open forum or one party can impose the terms of the discussion before it even begins, but these are mutually exclusive options. I hope my experience in Egypt — although it has been much more radical — can show how dangerous it is to begin the game of silencing discussion. The issue is imperative not just for the people of Gaza and Israel, but for us as well.