“The Arab Spring: A Year That Changed the World,” a conference hosted by Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER), drew about 200 participants to the Portland State University campus on Feb. 25. The conference featured a number of notable experts and activists on the Middle East, including As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University; Mokhtar Alkhanshali of Yemeni Youth for Change; Nora Barrows-Friedman, a journalist with The Electronic Intifada; Joel Beinin, professor of Middle East History at Stanford University; and Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of Middle East Studies at Rutgers University,
along with among others.

The conference approached the Arab uprisings that swept the world last year from a number of perspectives in a series of sessions and a final panel where the panelists assessed the challenges facing those uprisings. In the final plenary a consensus appeared to emerge that the Arab spring has just begun and that it is too early to tell its eventual outcome. But there also appeared to be agreement among the panelists that the Arab spring is one of the most promising democratic upheavals to have occurred in the world as a whole, not just the Middle East, and that it holds great potential for those seeking economic and social justice.

The conference took place just days after the end of a successful hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoner Khader Adnan, who came near death after a 66-day hunger strike to protest Israel’s military laws in the Occupied Territories that allow for prisoners to be detained indefinitely without charges and without their lawyers being allowed to see the alleged evidence against them. Participants in the session on “Palestine and the Arab Spring,” led by Barrows-Friedman, noted that the United States recently adopted a similar indefinite detention bill as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Media pundits have asked in the last year when the Arab Spring would come to Palestine, but Barrows-Friedman in her session titled “Palestine and the Arab Spring” observed that in many ways the Arab Spring owes its inspiration to the Palestinian struggle for equal rights and national liberation which has been ongoing since 1948. “The notion of the Arab Spring is not new for the Palestinians,” she pointed out. Palestinian workers, students, women, the young and the old, have been using mass forms of nonviolent struggle and resistance, including general strikes and demonstrations, for decades, she added, even though these protests have been met with extreme
brutality by the Israeli military and security forces.

Another misconception promoted by the corporate media has also distorted the uprising in Egypt, Beinin pointed out in his session titled “Workers’ Struggles in the Arab Spring.” The corporate media tended to ignore, if not completely omit, the role of workers in the uprising that ousted the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Beinin noted that between 1998 and 2011, nearly 2 million Egyptian workers participated in almost 4,000 strikes as they fought the neoliberal economic policies imposed on Egypt by U.S. ruling circles. The same class warfare policies that face U.S. workers, especially the assault on the collective bargaining rights and benefits of public
workers such as school teachers and government employees, also robbed Egyptian workers of job security and the ability to keep up with an inflation rate that rose as high as 18.3 percent in 2008.

“The United States is not going to like popular power in Egypt,” Beinin predicted. He observed that even though the labor movement is not well-represented in the new government emerging there, in part because independent trade unions have not been allowed, the quest for economic and social justice is just in its beginning stages. “Egypt has not really had a revolution, it’s had a removal of the head of state, “ Beinin said, adding that much of the state apparatus used for repression remains intact.

One of the most popular sessions at the conference was led by Abu Khalil, who also writes the Angry Arab blog. In a session titled “The U.S. and the Arab Revolt” that drew a standing-room-only crowd, Abu Khalil noted the centrality of Israel to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He argued that the United States seeks to maintain Israel’s military superiority and monopoly on nuclear weapons, using Israel as a local police force while also striving to keep tyrannical regimes in power throughout the Middle East. The purpose of all this is to preserve U.S. economic interests, especially access to oil and the maintenance of stable oil prices, Abu Khalil observed.

Other sessions at the one-day conference included “The Arab Spring and the Debunking of Islamophobic Myths,” “Revolt and ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in Syria,” “The Art of Resistance in Palestine,” “The Uprising in Yemen,” and “Black Liberation and Palestine.” The latter session was led by Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle school teacher who recently returned from the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a member of the Interfaith Peace Builders African Heritage Palestine Delegation. Hagopian noted that Israel is engaged in an effort known as “blackwashing,” an attempt to cover up its crimes against the Palestinians by portraying itself as a friend of the
African American civil rights struggle. One such effort was the naming of a national forest after Coretta Scott King without revealing that the forest was created on the remains of a destroyed Palestinian village, one of nearly 500 destroyed by Israel in 1948 when it
forced 750,000 Palestinians to become refugees.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend every session. Fortunately, progressive KBOO  FM radio (90.7) recorded many of the sessions and for a 3-hour special aired at the end of March. In addition to KBOO, other co-sponsoring organizations were the Arab Persian Student Union, International Socialist Organization, PSU Middle East Studies Center, Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Friends of Sabeel, Jewish Voice for Peace, Portland BDS Coalition, Sociology of Islam, Lutherans for Justice in the Holy Land, Oregon Jericho, Peace Action Committee of the First Unitarian Church, and the Saudi Student Club.

Rod Such is a local writer and a reporter for The Portland Alliance.

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