Global March to Gaza : Pouf!

"We were stopped at a checkpoint, they took our passports, they have detained us."

"They have put us in a barrier like animals."

"As a Canadian citizen, I am reminding you [Canada's Foreign Affairs Department]of your duty to act when Canadian[s] are in danger in Egypt."

Torontonian Nour Hadidi

 

"[Egypt retained] the right to take all necessary measures to preserve its national security, including the regulation of the entry and movement of individuals within its territory, especially in sensitive border areas."

Egyptian Foreign Ministry 

 

"Avoid all travel to northern Sinai due to terrorist activity and ongoing military operations by the Egyptian Armed Forces."

"Canadians who choose to travel to the region do so at their own risk."

Global Affairs Canada, travel advisory 

Demonstrators stand at a checkpoint at the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, Egpyt, where activists are being detained and had their passports confiscated. (Submitted by Tatiana Harker)

 

"A lot of people are being detained, left in the [heat] without any answers, for two to three hours."

"The [Canadians] have been contacting the Canadian embassy in Cairo with no answer whatsoever."

"Our government is completely ignoring us."

We're not expecting to breach the siege. We're not expecting to breach the borders. We're doing it in a [peaceful] humanitarian way. 

Tatiana Harker, Palestine Vivra Montreal 

 

"Several people had their phones taken then returned."

"We suspected they have installed new SIM  cards with spyware."

New Brunswick professor Jeff Houlihan 

 

"Some have been waiting for hours detained at a checkpoint between Cairo and Ismailia]." 

"Some people have been told to get their passports back, they have to get on a bus to the airport to be deported."

Ontario physician Yipeng Ge 

Members of a convoy of at least 1,500 people, including activists and supporters from Algeria and Tunisia, shout pro-Palestinian slogans as they gather on their way to Gaza's Rafah Crossing with Egypt, in Zawiya, Libya, on Tuesday. (Yousef Murad/AP)

 

The Canadian protesters who gathered at the Rafah crossing in Egypt expecting to make their way into Gaza in solidarity with Hamas, and who sneeringly refer to Canada as a supporter of 'genocide' and itself an illegally constituted country which colonized the northern half of North America, illegally appropriating it from Canada's Indigenous people on whom a 'cultural genocide' was perpetrated are now bleating heartbreakingly at an official Canada that prewarned entry to Egypt under present conditions would be a their own risk and is failing to provide consular services to them. 

 

They don't feel that it is their own responsibility to manoeuvre themselves out of a compromised situation they willingly entered. Egypt has made it clear that it will not permit invaders, even those who call themselves humanitarian rescuers of Palestinian babies from the malign clutches of despised Israel which in their worldview has no moral right of legitimacy to presume it must respond to the slaughter of Israeli citizens with the intention to neutralize completely the violence that Palestinian leadership and Palestinian terrorist groups have subjected it to for decades.

 

The intention was to march in solidarity of numbers representing a mixture of nationalities aspiring to give moral and practical assistance to embattled Palestinians caught in their government's spiderweb of terror prodding Israel to respond to the October 7 declaration of war with its own version of a final conflict to extinguish the threat that refused to go away on its own. The trouble with the best laid plans of mice and men is not to consider what other mice and men on their very own territory might deem as offensive to their own positions.

 

And so, Egyptian authorities and locals interdicted the intent of the organized demonstration of solidarity with Gaza. What they accomplished for themselves was arrests, detentions, and confiscation of their passports by Egyptian security officials -- among them an estimated 40 Canadians of the almost-100 that had originally set out with the international group that called themselves principled humanitarians. 

 

The Instagram account linking Canadian participants in the Global March to Gaza spoke of "harrowing" treatment meted out to its members, in Egypt. Quoting one unidentified "member of the Canadian delegation" who detailed the scene of participants forced onto waiting vans, having refused to board them voluntarily. "They eventually dragged us up violently into vans. They treated my black Muslim sisters horribly especially" read the account.

 

"They have beaten people. I have seen one woman that was beaten in her face in front of me", German organizer Melanie Schweizer said, describing activists being "pushed" and "dragged" onto deportation buses in a video. Ottawa physician Yipeng Ge who recently described Canada on social media as a white supremacist "settler colonial state" needing to be destroyed was also detained. Ge, prominent in the anti-Israel community, posted support letters from two NDP MPs, Leah Gazan and Alexandre Boulerice.

 

Egypt's ambassador to Canada, Ahmed Hafaz, was appealed to by MP Leah Gazan to help ensure the Canadian activists would be released, and to see that they would be allowed to continue their march through the Sinai peninsula up to the Egyptian border with Gaza. Intended partially as a critique of Egyptian government policy, the Global March to Gaza, was not a great hit in Egypt which maintains a heavily fortified border with Gaza. 

 

Members of a convoy of at least 1,500 people wave Palestinian flags from a bus as the group travels towards Gaza [Yousef Murad/ AP]