Thursday 25th of April 2024

the wall business .....

the wall business .....

Driving parallel to the borderline between Egypt and Gaza, one can spot the machinery behind the conspicuous wall construction project meant to stop ongoing smuggling through underground tunnels.

Some 80 meters away from the borderline, there were two cranes and a spiral driller. Four trucks loaded with sand and two with iron panels had just arrived on site. The usual silence of the borderland is broken by the sounds of this equipment and the few workers around them. People in the area say the wall will be dug between 18 and 25 meters deep and will extend all the way between the Egyptian-controlled Rafah and the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom border crossings with Gaza.

The wall is meant to hack the tunnel structures, which extend from the Egyptian side of the border to the Gaza's side for distances that range between 400 meters and 1,700 meters. With many prohibitions on the ground, the tunnels have become a lucrative underground alternative. The wall construction portrays the depth of this underground urbanism, bringing the conflict between smugglers and the security to the forefront.

According to smugglers in the area, the process kicked off 25 days ago, when workers came to uproot the few olive trees lined up on the construction site. The wall basically consists of a series of iron panels placed along the 13.8-kilometer borderline. The panels are overlapping and held together with molded steel connections. Smugglers said the panels will also include sensors to detect any movement. A faint hope for smugglers remained as they thought they could still run their tunnels underneath this 20-meter wall.

However, the water element is what has convinced many that the wall will be invincible.

No happy ending

http://www.countercurrents.org/attalah090110.htm

When a Wall is not a Wall.

The Berlin wall came down with "freedom" activists over-reacting and making the whole thing a circus.

Meanwhile, there is no such "freedom" demonstrations from these same activists at the Jewish Wall in occupied Palestine or the new steel wall being built by the US army, in Egyptian territory, for the express Jewish purpose of further strangling the "Auschwitz" style concentration camp of Gaza. 

From Counter Currents Org.

By Aljazeera

Egyptian authorities have announced that all aid convoys travelling to Gaza will be banned from travelling across Egypt after a riot broke out at the Rafah border crossing earlier in the week

By Ali Abunimah

Having been held hostage, we were forced to negotiate our own release. It was a lesson -- if we needed one -- that when it comes to the siege of Gaza, the United States government is not part of the solution, but an active part of the problem. And, the United States is not beyond relying on the repressive police tactics of the Egyptian state to protect itself from the opinions of its own citizens

By Lina Attalah

Self-protection is the argument in use by the Egyptian government in explaining the wall construction, besides reaffirmations that the wall is built on Egyptian land, and hence it is a sovereign act. But the Egyptian opposition and Gaza activists dubb it as "the wall of shame"

By William Pfaff

My question is the following. Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of more than 700 military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war rather than provide security?

By Case Wagenvoord

The first rule of unnecessary warfare is that when you have a goose that is laying golden eggs you keep it off the dinner menu. It is imperative that you keep it fat and healthy, no matter what the costs. The priority in such a war is not a healthy army, it’s healthy defense contractors, and if you have to hollow out your army to keep them healthy you do so

End of quotes.

The articles that these represent are of course much longer but, I believe that the small sections carry the message rather well?

God Bless Australia and keep us free from Zionist aggression.  NE OUBLIE.

 

 

the world's (US) shame...

From Robert Fisk

They are the real resistance. They are the lung through which Gaza breathes. True, missiles must pass along their subterranean tracks, Qassam rockets, too, Kalashnikov ammunition, explosives. But by far the greatest burden of the tunnellers of Gaza is the very life-blood of this besieged little pseudo-Islamic statelet: fresh meat, oranges, chocolate, shirts, trousers, toys, cigarettes, wedding dresses, paper, entire motor-cars in four bits, car batteries, even plastic bottle tops. The tunnellers of Gaza are bombed by the Israelis, they die in their own collapsing tunnels – and now they face a new Egyptian wall, even the fear of drowning. Terrorists they may be to the Israelis – the promiscuous use of this word makes it fairly meaningless these days – but heroes they are to the Palestinians of Gaza. Rich ones, too, perhaps.

But right now, Abdul-Halim al-Mohsen is worried about the Egyptians. He sits by the spitting log fire near the shaft of his tunnel, turning his hands to the flames, breathing in the thick blue smoke, a vast white tent above him casting his fellow-tunnellers into Rembrandt-like shadow, half-faces, thick pullovers, bright flames amid the gloom, the generator purring in the corner.

"Of course I'm afraid of the Egyptian wall," al-Mohsen says. "They will pour water down. How can we defeat this? We may drown." He holds out the palms of his hands towards me in that familiar "what-can-we-do?" gesture of so many Palestinians – but he is speaking in a matter-of-fact voice. The tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egyptian frontier are a business, a professional's game, Israel's bombs a challenge rather than a problem. There's even a four-truck miniature railway down one of the shafts. Money makes the wheels go round.

True to their treaties with Israel and the Quartet (of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara fame [a vicious little man]), the Egyptians announced last month that they will build a wall – walls being the currency of the Middle East these days, from Kabul and Baghdad to the West Bank – between the southern-most rubble of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and Egypt, in order to break through and close down the "terrorist" tunnels. Foreign NGOs in Gaza dismiss this as the usual Egyptian window-dressing to please the Israelis – which means to please the Americans – adding that the Egyptian wall will only descend 18 feet beneath the ground, falling far short of the tunnels' depth. Perhaps it is in the tunnellers' interest to be more pessimistic. Al-Mohsen seems genuinely troubled by the Egyptian initiative.

"If they flood our tunnel, our dangers increase," he says.

------------------

Gaza is the largest concentration camp on earth, enclosed by the most vicious of the Israeli people — not those who survived the death camps and the death marches in Germany — but the sadistic psychopathic sons and daughters of these survivors who can't believe they have gone wrong, with their heirs full of hate. This concetration camps is also enforced by the descendants of the jewish Bolsheviks and is encouraged by the American religious jewry whose god is vengeful and has little mercy. And in this camp of despair, there is no arbeit... What a poor lot we are to allow this to happen.

There are no longer any rules.

This precedent against humanity has taken 60 plus years to encourage our attention.  With all of the platitudes that have surfaced since the two “Great Wars” and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights – I ask like you do Gus – “what a poor lot we are to allow this to happen.”

And I quote:

Gaza is the largest concentration camp on earth, enclosed by the most vicious of the Israeli people — not those who survived the death camps and the death marches in Germany — but the sadistic psychopathic sons and daughters of these survivors who can't believe they have gone wrong, with their heirs full of hate. These concentration camps is also enforced by the descendants of the Jewish Bolsheviks and is encouraged by the American religious Jewry whose god is vengeful and has little mercy. And in this camp of despair, there is no albeit... What a poor lot we are to allow this to happen.

As usual Gus, you hit the nail on the head.

Let’s hypothesize for a moment and consider that the behavior of the Zionists, perhaps harking back to Mount Zion after Canaan, is to create under any circumstances, a state with the intention of being a duplicate of one of the two Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This would then be a state without interference from the “Romans” of that era or after and would be a pure racist “state”?

And since the unprecedented intention of the Zionists is to allow only Jews to be citizens it would be the only “state” where racism is paramount?

This leads me to wonder why?  Why would a race of people so powerful in the nations (of any import), want a state of their own absolutely beyond the rules of international law – as they are at the moment?  Could it be that they want a unique situation where only Jews may have the rights of citizenship and the remainder, are slaves to their owners? As they are currently in Palestine?  As they were in ancient Judah?

 

There is no such thing as expecting the Zionists to negotiate. Theirs is the total demand of control and will never change.

 

As I have written before – the successful Jewish people in some of the twenty major countries of the world – have power which they often exercise. Why would they want more?

 

Could it be that with dual citizenship – they could go to the mythical state of Israel and nothing can touch them?

 

God Bless Australia. NE OUBLIE.

 

 

the time of oranges...

This film shows how Jaffa started out as a Palestinian place name before becoming an Israeli brand name and how the orange harvest shifted from being a joint undertaking into a symbol used by both parties in the conflict.

Archive film and photographs show how propaganda was used to erase the memory of a thriving place where Arabs and Jews worked together.

Art historians and political analysts talk about the images which are projected onto their walls, and elderly orange growers remember the time before their world was destroyed.

Please note that this film will only be available to watch online until November 14.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2012/02/20122166933773157.html