While Tzipi and Bibi are slogging it out in the Israeli elections on programs of the destruction and mass murder of the original inhabitants of the land they and their ancestors stole the Palestinians in the Gaza strip are trying to survive the best they can while they await their fate. If Bibi get’s in the get slaughtered. If Tzipi get’s in they get slaughtered too and still they fight to survive.
Resistance takes as many forms as life itself dictates.
Life in Gaza could not be more impossible. Its tunnels are a symbol of resistance.
Eighteen months ago, outraged when the Palestinians voted for the militant leadership of Hamas in democratic elections, Israel imposed a total lockdown on the entire population of Gaza.
But the entire people were determined to continue to resist. They found a way to circumvent total starvation.
The Israeli blockade led to a new economic structure, an underground economy. The besieged Palestinians have dug more than 1,000 tunnels under the totally sealed border.
Many thousands of Palestinians are now employed in digging, smuggling or transporting, and reselling essential goods. Smuggling constitutes approximately 90 percent of economic activity in Gaza, Gazan economist Omar Shaban told The Guardian. (Oct. 22, 2008)
The tunnels demonstrate the great ingenuity and enormous determination of the entire population and its leadership.
Because millions of Palestinians have been forced into refugee status outside of historic Palestine, large extended families on both sides of the border help arrange the buying and shipping of goods or send funds so family members locked in Gaza can buy essential supplies.
The tunnels connect the Egyptian town of Rafah with the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name inside Gaza. They have become a fantastic, life-sustaining network of corridors dug through sandy soil. Tunnels are typically three-tenths of a mile long, approximately 45 to 50 feet deep. They cost from $50,000 to $90,000 and require several months of intense labor to dig.
They pass under the Philadelphi buffer zone—a border strip of land put under Israeli military control by the 1993 Oslo accords.
The Israeli siege of Gaza, followed by 23 days of systematic bombing and invasion, has created massive destruction and scarcity. Food processing plants, chicken farms, grain warehouses, U.N. food stocks, almost all the remaining infrastructure, and 230 small factories were destroyed. Now hundreds of trucks packed with essential supplies from international and humanitarian agencies sit outside the strip, refused entry to Gaza by Israeli guards. As soon as the Israeli bombing ended, work on the tunnels resumed.
Read more
