"Enough is enough! Ya basta!"

This is the phrase that launched to Zapatista "revolution" on January 1, 1994, the day the NAFTA Agreement came into effect. What made their battle cry of “Enough is enough” so important was that it was an explicit response to the imposition of neoliberalism on their communities through the NAFTA accords signed the year before. The Zapatista response to the neoliberal onslaught became the inspiration for many of the most successful European movements of the second half of the 1990s, particularly the Italian (so-called) "anti" globalization movements such as Ya Basta! and Tutte Bianchi/Disobedienti, whose tactics of aggressive and even theatrical nonviolent civil disobedience were hallmarks of the anti-WTO/World Bank/IMF protests of 1999 through 2001 and beyond.

Two years after the Zapatista revolt, and one year after the founding of the WTO in 1995, an historic “encuentro” (meeting) was held under Zapatista auspices. Titled the “Intercontinental Meeting Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity,” it was attended by 3,000 activists from Mexico, Latin America, and indeed the world at large (including Iran, Turkey and Mauritania). The encuentro was important for two reasons: it was one of the first international meetings where a truly global collection of activists came together to strategize about the ways to resist neoliberalism at the grass roots level in their home countries; and at the same time there was a significant focus on building international solidarity networks as a fundamental part of this struggle.

While a few intrepid citizens of the Middle East and larger Muslim majority world attended the encuentro and even lived with the Zapatistas, by and large the Zapatista philosophy and strategy of well coordinated and conceptualized, but mainly non-violent, resistance (they ended their armed rebellion almost as soon as it began, having killed only a few soldiers and no civilians) against an oppressive government and world system did not make it to the Middle East. But it should have, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see a copy of Subcommandante Marco's writings on the bookshelf of an activists in a refugee camp in Bethlehem a couple of years ago. If Marcos had made it to Palestine, surely there was hope that a non-violent form of positive resistance and re-imagining of people's identities and relationships to each other was possible in the Middle East.

Well, my Palestinian friend explained, that wouldn't be so easy. The director of a grass roots community center, he explained that "In principle, we have much in common with the Zapatista experience: the concept of an indigenous community with its land stolen and continuing oppression is the same. But the issue is the objective reality that has taken root on the ground since then… Even as Palestinians need to reconsider, reimagine and reconstruct the Palestinian political discourse, it’s hard to adopt the Zapatista lessons about resistance, and even the way they directly bring neoliberal globalization into their critique, because for us resisting occupation is a practical strategy that must address our objective reality in the occupation rather than some idealized goal such as neoliberal globalization."

Moreover, he continued, “our starting point of the struggle is completely different than the Zapatistas, which started in response to globalization while we have a long history as a national liberation struggle going back to the anti-colonial period. Because of this, pressing global issues such as civil society or advocating some kind of ‘autonomy’ rather than total independence (as the Zapatistas ask for) is a non-starter in Palestine.” Nevertheless, the Zapatista experience was very valuable for Palestine as inspiration for trying to forge similarly global connections with the transnational anti-corporate globalization movement, and now the larger global peace and justice movement. As he explains it, “The ideas of Marcos are an inspiration, to link myself and the Cultural Center to other actors around the world this is the inspiration of the Zapatistas, their networking with other communities. Even social movements in Europe, like the environmental movement, are inspirational for our long term strategies.”

“But on the daily level the acceleration of struggle here is so intense you can’t even think about new and more creative, even non-violent ways to resist. Just going about daily life is an act of supreme non-violence in the context of the occupation. You’re on the defensive. It’s very hard. In fact, for normal Palestinians living daily life, they don’t care any more if we have a good or bad image in West. They say, ‘We have to self-exist, whatever we have to do to survive. We have to fight to show the world we’re alive.’”

This comment struck me as the essence of Zapatismo, however; the same language and reasoning used by the Zapatista leadership to justify their revolt: “We have to fight, to show the world we’re alive,” as my friend put it, is very similar to Marcos’s belief, “Enough dying this useless death; it is better to fight for change.” But while in the heart of the remote Lacandian jungle region of Chiapas this view led to an innovative strategy and larger ideology, in the refugee camps of Palestine or cities of Arab Iraq, with their daily toll of dead and wounded, there is little time for reflection and built a mass civil movement for change.

Which is probably why the most important new protests against political oppression in the region have not occurred there (yet) but rather in slightly more peaceful Beirut and especially Egypt. In fact, the name of the new movement for democracy in Egypt is "kefaya," which is Arabic for Enough.

What makes the Kefaya movement so interesting is that it seems to indicate that large swaths of Egyptian society have finally had enough of the Mubarak regime and the larger regional and world system in which it functions. Like its counterpart in Beirut—and perhaps more so, judging by some of the writings I've looked at—it seems that Kefaya represents a truly cross-class, cross-cultural alliance of various sectors of Egyptian society: Leftistst intellectuals, Islamists (a key difference with Beirut, where the religious and largely Shi‘i Muslim groups like Hizbollah have by and large not come together with more progressive secular intellectuals and activists yet in a common agenda), and even Nasserists have come together in the largest demonstrations against the Mubarak regime in some 25 years. As activists shouted out words like "poverty" and "torture" the crowds respond back with "kefaya!"

When cops start to break up the protests, everyone pulls out cell phones and organizes new routes and locations to move to and continue the protest before the police can stop them, picking up a tactic that has been used to great effect in anti-corporate globalization protests across the US and Europe the last half decade. And organizers are working hard to figure out new strategies to subvert the police oppression of their protests through non-violent means, so that when they chant "kefaya, kefaya, we have reached the end!" they are really just at the beginning of a long and interesting journey (towards what one writer has dubbed the "second republic") that is not so different from the one started by Marcos a decade ago. In fact, on the group's "who we are" page of its Arabic website, it specifically situates itself vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization as a direct, society-wide response to it. In a word, "Enough!" just as people are shouting across Latin America and elsewhere in increasing numbers.

In fact, it seems that my Palestinian friend was being a bit too pessimistic, as the protesters in Egypt chant “Enough to Mubarak, Enough to Bush, Enough to Blair,'' and "We will not be ruled by the CIA." An article on the kefaya.org (seems to have only Arabic as of yet unfortunately) is titled "50 Years is Enough," which is—most likely deliberately—taking up the name of the organization 50 Years is Enough that has been at the forefront of the anti-corporate globalization movement in US since Seattle in 1999. Only for this version, the fifty years is not since the birth of the World Bank and IMF but since the Revolution that swept Nasser, and ultimately Mubarak, into autocratic power in Eygpt.

That is, they see the links that my friend believes can't be made in Palestine or Iraq. They have the time to sit and ask, as does another article on the Kefaya website, "What kind of revolution is this revolution to be?" And to answer it with an affirmatively democratic, even progressive vision.

Perhaps my Palestinian friend is right, as Kefaya has yet to spread across the region to either country (would that it did!). And indeed, no one I know is looking towards the US for help. As a May 10 Oped in al-Hayat rightly asks, how can American neo-conservatives and the Bush Administration particularly can push for democracy when they have invaded Iraq and caused so much damage there while supporting continued autocracy across the region?

American can't bring democracy, but the people of the region can. And if the world is lucky, more and more of them will soon be reading Subcomandante Marcos.

Final thought: According to today's NY Times, on her recent trip to Baghdad, Secretary of State Rice is reported to have"urged a more convincing effort to reach out to the dispossessed Sunni Arab minority, warning that success in the war required a political strategy that encouraged at least some Sunni insurgent groups to turn toward peace." At the same time, senior military commandars are warning that"if we let go of the insurgency and take our foot off its throat, then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos."

These words would be funny if they weren't so scary. Rice and the generals know full well that the insurgency will not end until the US announces (and more likely, completes) a full withdrawal of its forces from Iraq. Moreover, to say that the country could"go back" into civil and chaos is to assume the country isn't in the middle of chaos and something increasingly resembling civil war this very day. Let's hope the general was being disingenuous and isn't that far removed from reality. Indeed, both the chaos or civil war started exactly on that fateful March day when the US forces first rolled into Iraq. Until the Bush Administration accepts its role in creating the disaster that continues to unfold there, more Iraqis and Americans will die.

The problem is, chaos and semi-civil war are about the only things that are forcing Iraqis to continue tolerating a massive military presence in the country; and since the US has no plans of leaving Iraq any time in the foreseeable future, there would seem to be a slight conflict on interest here. That is, the very goals the US has publicly set for itself--ending chaos and civil war, establishing a democratic government--are exactly the things that would allow Iraqis to tell America to leave, which is exactly what it has no plans to do. This is the real reason why the lead paragraph of the above-quoted articles states that US generals are"pulling back" from suggestions of any drawdown of troops in the next year.