Gaza Exodus into Egypt: UN reports 350,000 have crossed into Egypt

 

The people of Gaza have blown up a wall of the biggest prison on earth, and with it they have outflanked Israel, shown international humanitarian law to be a sick joke, shaken the Egyptian dictatorship, and shamed all of those who have stood by and allowed Israel to carry out its crimes unhindered.  Among the tens of thousands who overwhelmed yesterday’s harsh opposition from Egyptian security police, some went to visit long-separated relatives, some for life-saving medicines and all to buy necessities of life no longer available in Gaza.  While the chancelleries of the world worked to force the Palestinians to abandon all hope of resisting Israel or of recovering their lost lands, once again, as so often in history, tens of thousands of extra-ordinary ‘ordinary people’ - a few of them lightly-armed fighters -cleared the way to freedom.

The Egyptian regime has failed to bottle up the Palestinians while the Israelis go about their killing, even pumping a little girl’s head with bullets to ‘confirm their kill’. Even if the wall separating Gazans from their Arab brothers and sisters is put back in place, it will only be temporary: when Gazans need to get to Egypt they will do so.  Israel can, and will, continue the killing but it has lost one key weapon from its armoury.  When the Egyptian police stood aside and allowed Palestinians to flood into Gaza, Mubarak’s regime was weakened.  Reuters reports a wave of arrests of pro-Palestinians in Cairo, but the example of Gazans unbowed by Israeli terrorism will continue to eat away at the fear that keeps Egyptians from joining those who oppose their President-for-life.

Perhaps we will look back from the future and see this popular tearing down of a small bit of wall as the beginning of the undoing of the geometric border system foisted on the Arabs by the UK and France in the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide and plunder the region.

Every decent human being on the planet is with the Palestinian Arab people of Gaza.   Against them is still arraigned the US, EU, World Bank, the UN and the Arab regimes.  As Israel carried out its plan to reduce them to levels of hunger, cold and misery unique in the Mediterranean coast, the silence of world civil society screamed that they were getting their just deserts and that the punishment would never end until they kissed the Israeli whip and conceded that the European colonists who drove them out of their homes and land were justified.