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Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a prominent Egyptian activist, blogger, and software developer. Born in 1981, Alaa has repeatedly been jailed—under Mubarak, Morsi, and the Sisi regimes—often on charges like “spreading false news” and “joining illegal organisations,” and has endured harsh conditions, torture, and long spells in solitary confinement.

After being sentenced to five years in prison in 2021, Alaa technically completed his term in September 2024, but authorities refused to count his two years of pre-trial detention, extending his incarceration to 2027.

For issue #137, we excerpt from You Have Not Been Defeated Yet: Selected Works 2011–2021, where he recounts his visit to Palestine in 2012 where he is confronted with the dystopian reality of Gaza under siege.

Our hotel is on the seafront; the sea is the same as ours, no surprise that it looks the same. But night falls, and the sea is fenced in by floodlights. To make sure the siege is absolute, the enemy has caged the sea itself.

Usually, it isn’t possible to engage with any geographical unit larger than a neighbourhood, or maybe a village, as a material entity that we can grasp with our senses. Cities, regions, and nations are essentially symbolic entities. To see Egypt as a whole, you have to look at a map, you have to engage with ideas about history, a nation, and other symbols: the Nile or the Pyramids or, maybe, Tahrir Square.

The Zionists have succeeded in treating the Gaza Strip as a physical body, that can be caged and walled in—even its sea. This ‘achievement’ in itself is legendary, and beyond my ability to comprehend.

The vocabulary and the details of the siege seem like they’re out of a science-fiction novel set in humanity’s dark future: an entire society behind bars, the sea fenced in, hovering robots that can kill you at any moment, aeroplanes roaring through the sound barrier at all hours, an economy of underground tunnels, and a mighty hidden enemy whose agents are concrete, iron and fire. You never see it but it is always present.

In Terminator the computer Skynet achieves self-awareness in August 1997—and then world domination. In 2029, human resistance inflicts major losses on Skynet, which starts to send killer cyborgs back in time to stamp out the resistance in its cradle.

In current human consciousness the siege of Gaza cannot be permitted. Human society doesn’t countenance killer robots; we still talk about war in the language of knights, where you meet the enemy face to face, and courage and strength are more important than equipment. What’s happening in Gaza—and some of it is happening in other places around the world—is out of context, like it’s been sent back in time from some grim future we haven’t arrived at yet.

We don’t philosophize or theorize: we shy away from thinking about it. 

Excerpted with permission from You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, published by Seven Stories Press in 2022. 

The Internationalist Archive