By Damian Lataan | July 06, 2013
As much as the Egyptian street generally sympathise with the plight of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, it seems the new Egyptian regime are falling over themselves to make themselves look good in the eyes of the US in order to ensure that the promised $1.5 billion of aid comes there way despite the coup. Unfortunately, one element of their approach to appeasing the US is by demonstrating that they are mindful of Israel’s concerns with regard to security about the Gaza Strip. And one way of showing they mean business is to close down the Gaza Strip’s supply line tunnels between the Strip and Egypt.
Yesterday the Egyptian army began bulldozing the tunnels. The immediate effect in the Gaza was panic buying and huge price hikes that most Palestinians can ill afford to pay. The cost of living was high enough as it was but now, if the supplies remain cut off for some time, life will steadily become even more unbearable.
Just to add to the turmoil, Fatah, the organisation that governs the West Bank under Abbas, is now calling on its supporters in the Gaza to rise up against Hamas. Hamas, one might recall, were rejected by the West after squarely and fairly winning the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council.
The blame for all this turmoil – not just in Egypt but throughout the entire Middle East – can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of the US and Israel who has contrived to foment as much friction as they possibly can between secularists and Islamists in the Arab world, and between Sunni and Shia in the world of Islam. On the odd occasion that ‘democracy’ does give the people the opportunity to make their choices, it is the West that rejects those choices and then encourages turmoil that attempts to replace the people’s choices.
In the end it’s just ordinary people who are already struggling to survive that suffer most. The West must leave these people alone to make their own choices and, once the choices have been made, should not be interfered with simply because the West thinks the people made choices the West disagrees with.
Gaza, at the very least, must be allowed to freely trade with whoever they please and not be punished en masse simply because they didn’t vote for the people the West wanted them to vote for.
Related articles
- Egyptian army demolishes tunnels with Gaza (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Egyptian army reinforces presence on the borders with Gaza (ramyabdeljabbar.wordpress.com)
- Egyptians continue to keep Gaza’s only exit closed (gazasolidarity.blogspot.com)