Not A Prison
October 23, 2008, Matthew Good What do you call a place that you have to smuggle livestock into using a kilometer long tunnel? A prison? Well, logic dictates that if you had a kilometer long tunnel you could escape from that prison and wouldn’t need to smuggle in livestock. Unless, of course, that prison is the Gaza strip and you can’t use that tunnel because the Egyptians simply wouldn’t tolerate some 1.5 million people popping out of it.
Instead, to meet the demands of Id Al-Adha, the Islamic feast of sacrifice in which animals are slaughtered to feed the poor to seek God’s forgiveness, livestock have to be smuggled into Gaza using one of an estimated 800 tunnels that are used to transport goods between Egypt and Gaza. Weapons, of course, are forbidden to be smuggled through the tunnels, as Hamas has their own network for that. So, in short, to get around the blockade that has crippled Gaza, goods are brought in underground.
By the way, the dictionary definition of ghettoization is…
“Put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated place, group, or situation.”
Just for your information.
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underground economy
Do you have a better, safer idea?
Sounds like a prison to me…
So smuggling in contraband products, livestock and riffles is OK, but using the tunnels to get expectant mothers quickly to hospitals where they san safely give birth is NOT OK?
I understand the isolation has had a terrible effect on the quality of life of its Gaza residents but why can’t the Palestinians plan ahead for livestock availability for this annual feast? This is not about religion of feeding the poor. It’s about smugglers making money off of a bad situation.
It will certainly not help motivate the end of the economic blockade if the Palestinian “tunnel mafia” has vested interest in this underground system.
Unfortunately these kinds of blockades are smugglers’ bread and butter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually are smuggling some people into Egypt, not unlike the Coyotes smuggling Mexicans and South Americans into the US. If the you can scrape enough money together, someone will get you across the boarder, or just take your money and kill you.
Well it is a lot easier to complain about contraband if you do not live in a state of emotional, physical and political neglect. I for once think that this is part of a regime of prohibition, and basic necessities, but to the average person is the chance to get their hands on a luxury deal, something as rare as a decent meal. What have we got to say about that? Even if the deal, and the dealing itself is not a particularly good. Even if contraband is not the way to proceed. It appears to me, sometimes is the only way for the real people to enjoy a special day. Even if we at this moment have to battle within ourselves about how politically incorrect it is.
There is always going to be underground smuggling of anything that is in short supply whether it is animals for food or in some cases guns for war.
At least, the prison gates to the egytian side regularely open up for palestinians to provide themselves with the most necessary goods every time the israeli side decides to close its gates and stop any kind of supply.
If Egypt would offer all Gazans to come over and settle down, there were probably two major problems to occur:
first - many of the Gazans simply wouldn’t WANT to leave their homeland and
second - once the humanitarian disaster that is the Gaza strip would disappear out of the public’s eye, public pressure to solve the refugee problem would be taken from Israel, the problem itsself be considered solved. But would that mean, that justice was done?
3,5 Million palestinian refugees are living only in Jordan. Has anyone an Idea what this means for a small country like Jordan, economically as well as socially?
In my oppinion, it simply can’t be that every single country of the region would have to burden the outcomes of the zionist occupation, the zionist state itsself being the one and only exception.
I don’t know any other word for the situations of the Gazans than being ghettoized, completely left to the benevolence and exposed to the disposal of others.
Sorry but Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, not high on priority list when then ghettos in my own country grow. Americans must focus on their own crumbling country. Am liberal but this view sounds classically conservative. Here is a Great Article: http://artvoice.com/issues/v7n43/getting_a_grip
@ yobuffalo:
Americans are welcome to and certainly should focus on their own country. It would do the U.S. a lot of good and would most likely help progress the resolution of Palestinian issue as it is the U.S. that is strongly backing Israel and ignoring unlawful actions that it takes towards Palestinian people in general and in Gaza strip in particular.
It is a ghetto and what is happening there now is the exact equivalent of what was happening on Jewish ghettos in Poland during German occupation - freedom fighters and smuggling included
I miss the quote function. Tuuli22, I think the big question is whether it was sensible to put Israel smack-bang in the most religiously dangerous place on earth. Of course this was their traditional homeland - about 2000 years ago - but it would have been much safer and sensible to put it somewhere else. Because the reality is that it will be holocaust v2.0 when the US is eventually unable to support it. That way the Islamic world would have one less practical reason to so despise the US and its puppet state (and it’s people).
seriousbusiness:
I personally tend to think that there is no such “traditional homeland” in particular to the jews. The Israelites originally came out of Egypt in the main. While on their way to palestine, people from many regions such as North Africa, Mesopotamia or Canaan would join them for the most variable reasons, belief and the hope for a better life being the glue that kept them together.
There is in fact no explicit ethnic background the first people of Israel all had in common. Irrespective of the traditional jewish teaching that would preach a homogeneous “jewish people”, they were a rather multicultural group of people who had found together through their belief in God.
The State of Israel was established violently and was primarily based on the suppression of the people of Canaan that had to pay a high price in blood for the israelite’s claim to be the god-chosen inhabitants of that piece of land.
What we are witnessing in palestine since the early 1880s is the walk out of egypt for the promised land v2.0 - as violent, as ideologically connoted, as ignorant towards the feelings and rights of the people who had been living there for houndreds of years.
My ancestors lived in east-prussia and Alsace-Lorraine, since these parts once belonged to the german empire. But do I think only for one minute about claiming these regions to be reaffiliated to germany and then ONLY to be accessible for germans? I am actually getting sick when I just think about that.
Personally I think that the western backing of the foundation of the state of Israel in Palestine is to a great degree owed to western antisemitism that was still widely spread in Europe and North America at the time. And yes, I am clearly contrary to dear Mr. Goldhagen in that point. Antisemitism
wasn’t an explicit german evil - it was a mainstream notion in most parts of the western “civilized world”. It had its revival in the anticommunist era of the 50s in the USA (since US communism was mainly promoted by the jewish minority) and Winston Churchill was one of the most burning antisemites right behind the nazis (he even had words of admiration for Hitler in that point before the war started).
Shipping them from Europe and America to Palestine was an efficient way to get rid of a good part of the jews and to sort of “compensate” all the harm and the discrimination the jews had to deal with over centuries. To a great deal we let the palestinians pay for our crimes, for our ignorance against OUR jews. What a devilish plan.
For what I think, it would have been so important to confront ourselves with what we had done to the jews from the BEGINNING, instead of building them a nest elsewhere on the expense of others. Doing that, we pushed them away once again. And I personally feel much more guilty in that point than I feel responsible for the holocaust, since this is simply a generational issue.