My toothpaste, toothbrush, shavers and shaving foam. The clothes I'm wearing, the cough medicine I'm using to get rid of a persistent cough, the cigarettes I bought for Ahmed, and some tobacco for my arghile. My cell phone, the laptop onto which I compulsively type my eye-witness accounts from the hell surrounding me. All that's needed for a modest, yet dignified existence in Gaza comes from Egypt, and arrives on the shops' shelves through the tunnels. These are the very same tunnels that the Israeli F16s hasn't stopped heavily bombing in the last 12 hours, destroying along with them thousands of Rafah houses near the border.
A few months ago I had three teeth dodgy fixed, and at the end of the operation I asked my Palestinian dentist where he'd gotten all of his dental equipment from – the anesthetic, the syringes, ceramic inlays and all the other tools. With a sly look on his face, he'd made a certain gesture with his hands: from under ground. There's no doubt that through the tunnels underneath Rafah, explosives and weapons were also smuggled, the very same that the resistance is using today to try and contain the terrifying advance of the armour-plated Israeli death-machines. But it's next to nothing compared with the tons of consumer goods flowing into famished Gaza under this criminal siege.
It's easy enough on the internet to find photos documenting how even livestock comes in from Egypt through the tunnels. Sedated, strapped-up goats and cows are lowered into an Egyptian well, re-emerging on this side to provide milk, cheese and meat. Even the main hospitals in the Strip stocked up surreptitiously at the border. The tunnels were the only resource allowing the Palestinians to survive the siege, a siege which long before the current bombings, was the cause of a 60% unemployment rate and forced 80% of families to live off humanitarian handouts... (Read more at Gab's blog)
I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason
to carry death there.
Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just
the sons of Abraham?
O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to
their stiff-limbed sleep
as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet,
children dying there.
I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow
of the patriarch,
asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and
leave our flesh to time?© 2008 mrp/thepoetryman
Please visit Gabs at her wonderful blog...
Jewish Texts ("Turn backwards and you will see him.")
