About Those Tunnels

The tunnels in Gaza are supposedly being pounded by the IDF because they are used for smuggling weapons. However, most of the tunnels are just being used to smuggle food, medicine, household appliances, cooking gas, etc. The tunnels are run by underground business concerns in Rafah, and are quite lucrative. Each of the armed groups has their own smuggling tunnels for smuggling weaponry and whatnot. I find it hard to understand why tunnels that smuggle goods for the civilian population of Gaza must be bombed. The whole idea here, as from the very start of the blockade after Hamas won the election, is about punishing the civilian population for voting for Hamas. As soon as Hamas won, demands were placed on it by the Group of Four, apparently the US, Israel, the UK and the EU (So much for the anti-Semitic Europeans!). These demands were quite unreasonable. Among them were the recognition of Israel and the renunciation of violence. It should be pointed out that no one is demanding that Israel recognize Palestine or renounce violence. Anyway, an occupied people have the right to armed resistance. Since Hamas refused to obey, a cruel embargo was slapped on them, intended specifically to punish the people of Gaza for electing Hamas. This embargo resulted in over 5 The power plant was bombed – the plant which ran the sewage treatment plant – so raw sewage has been pouring out into the ocean and is now seeping into the aquifer, threatening to contaminate the water supply. The rocket attacks pretty much started when Israel refused to lift the embargo. After Israel pulled out of Gaza, it retained control over Gaza’s borders, including the borders at Egypt and the sea. Israel even retained control over Gaza’s population registry list. As a starting point at working towards a cease-fire, Israel could have offered to lift the blockade in return for a halt in rocket attacks. In Operation Cast Lead, it looks like Israel bombed that American school in Gaza, the crown jewel of Gaza’s education system, on purpose. Once again, the reason here is just to punish the civilian population for electing and supporting Hamas. There were no rockets being fired from anywhere near that school. The superb Norman Finkelstein has an excellent roundup (long) of the issues surrounding Operation Cast Lead 2008-2009 and the Lebanon War 2006, the real reasons for both of which were to “restore Israeli deterrence capacity vis a vis the Arabs” and to head off a potential peace settlement on terms that Israel considers to be unfavorable. The piece also deals with many issues surrounding the events leading up to Operation Cast Lead. Dem Arabs gittin a bit uppity, have to put dem in dey place.

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4 thoughts on “About Those Tunnels”

  1. “The power plant was bombed – the plant which ran the sewage treatment plant, so raw sewage has been pouring out into the ocean and is now seeping into the aquifer, threatening to contaminate the water supply.”
    Similarly…little known fact: “On 13 July 2006, and again on 15 July 2006, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Jiyeh power station, 30 km (19 mi) south of Beirut, resulting in the largest ever oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiyeh_power_station_oil_spill

  2. Antler – thanks for those links, but I have some doubts, although I’m sympathetic to the general case. I don’t for a minute believe that the median income for blacks is higher than for whites – excuse me if I’ve read that wrong.
    But, if those figures for Harvard are correct, it shows pretty much what I keep saying here – it’s jews, not whites, who are over-represented. The jews occupy the positions which, by percentage of the population, should be occupied by blacks. Sure, there are historic reasons for this – and anyone who doubts that there are excuses for the
    blacks is a racist (many generations of slavery, family ties broken, deliberately kept unskilled, discirimination, then concentrated in dying industries; and the time needed to build up a mass of business skills, experience and capital – whereas jews came with all that plus a network of contacts for access to capital). But more than that it must be obvious that the jewish percentage is way beyond anything that could be explained solely by cultural or historic factors – if it was just that, we would expect maybe that jews would have a very slight advantage over white gentiles, due to a ‘cultural bookishness’, but not on this scale – any gentile who accepts that jews are 10 times cleverer than us deserves to be a slave.
    so jews are favouring each other to the point of blatant illegal racism, and surely corruption – would it be surprising, if we were to examine the racial make-up of whatever bodies monitor entrance and exam standards for instance, if we found that there was a similar imbalance there, and that those ‘watchdogs’ reported back to politicians who… ? Well, we know the rest.
    This is a mafia. Listen to this interview with James Petras ( author of ‘the Power of Israel in the United States’) – he’s a much smarter guy than David Duke. Duke has his good points – he’s brave, but he slips too often into infantile racism.
    Petras is serious.
    James Petras: the Art of Plain Speaking
    http://tinyurl.com/c7ouj8
    Apparently the ‘left’ doesn’t support affirmative action anymore. I tried arguing along the lines above on a couple of the higher-profile UK lefty blogs, and I was told – ‘typical right-wing arguments’! Michael Rosen, our ‘children’s poet laureate’, prominent jewish ‘anti-zionist’ and Socialist Workers Party member, asked me ” what good would it do to [demote] one ethnic group” – that’s ok if that group is white gentiles, I suspect.
    And, of course, ” I believe in socialist revolution – I’m not interested in tinkering with the system”. No comment needed. I got barred from the blog shortly after that; that’s how it usually ends up with these people – what Noam Chomsky, in his controversial review of Faurisson’s book (which was used as an intro to the book, without his permission), called (roughly) ” the left’s continuing commitment to totalitarian nazi-Stalinist practices’.

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