Ironically, the first photo ever taken of me with a digital camera, was when I was on the run and hiding at a friend's place.
The initial wave of Palestine solidarity protests that engulfed virtually all (private and public) university campuses, during the first week of October 2000, was crushed. Police laid siege to the universities, showered the campuses with teargas. The moment students stepped off campus, they faced rubber bullets, birdshots, batons, and even attempts at running over protesters—scenes that flashed through my mind as we fought the police a decade later, on the Friday of Rage, 28 January 2011.
At the time, I was part of the committee that ran our, modest yet growing, Revolutionary Socialists student sector. I was kidnapped while driving in Giza by State Security Police (SS) on the night of 8 October 2000, and was taken to Lazoughly, where I was tortured and held for 4 days.
The protests flared once again by March 2002 as Ariel Sharon sent tanks into the West Bank, committing some of the worst atrocities. The wave started by demonstrations in the professional syndicates (the lawyers’ and journalists’ to be specific) by 27 March, simultaneously with mass mobilizations on the university campuses.
The situation escalated into a full scale two-day riot in the neighborhoods in Giza surrounding Cairo University on 1 April.
Anticipating a raid, I left my family house and went on the run for roughly a month. SS officers came to my house, and tried to force my mother to phone me to convince me to give myself up. I took the SIM card off the mobile, changed my hiding place, choosing a friend, who was remote from the activist scene. I showed up at his doorstep, explained the situation, and he let me in.
The guy was a tech geek, and that month I hid at his place was my first time to get introduced to a couple of things that mesmerized me: ADSL internet connection and digital camera.
SS finally got to me and detained me in May, during another wave of arrests prior to the planned Nakba anniversary protests. But these two little technological innovations I played with, during my month of hiding, started giving me some thoughts that we might have some tools that could change the entire political game.