Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

“Gaza is quite a dynamic place now”: an interview, openDemocracy, 29 - 01 - 2008
Eyad Sarraj

The breach of the Gaza-Egypt barrier is changing the region’s political calculations, the psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj tells the bitterlemons project.

bitterlemons: How has the border breach affected the situation on the ground in Gaza?

Eyad Sarraj is a founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP)

This article was first published in the independent website BitterLemons.org

Eyad Sarraj: Well, most people are not in Gaza at the moment. Some say that almost 700,000 people have been traveling in and out of Egypt. Gaza is flooded with the things that Israel did not allow us to have before and people are swarming to the markets to buy computers, cement, lamps, oil, fuel and even windows. When Israel bombed the deserted Palestinian interior ministry (on 18 January 2008), all the windows in the surrounding buildings were shattered. With no windows allowed in from Israel, they could not replace them before, but now there are new windows in place.

Everything is available in the market now. From forty NIS ($10.8) a packet, cigarettes are now down to six. There is chocolate for the children. People are almost euphoric since they can get out of the prison, even if it is only for a short respite. People go to El-Arish for a picnic, eat fish there and spend a couple of hours. Families sometimes go for the day and come back at night. Gaza is quite a dynamic place now.

Archbishop Christodoulos paid a historic visit to the Vatican in 2006

Greeks flock to mourn church head, BBC, January 31, 2008

Thousands of mourners have lined the streets of Athens for the funeral of Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church.

The archbishop died on Monday, aged 69, after suffering from cancer.

The funeral, with full state honours, comes after four days of official mourning across the country.

Thousands of people have already paid their last respects to the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, whose body lay in state at Athens’ cathedral.

The spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, led the funeral service at Athens’ main cathedral.

It was also attended by other senior Orthodox officials, Greek President Karolos Papoulias and Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. A delegation from the Vatican was also present.

Outside the cathedral, thousands of mourners waited as the funeral cortege wound its way to Athens’ cemetery.

The archbishop’s open coffin was carried on a gun carriage, accompanied by priests, government officials and a large military guard of honour.

“I cried when he died and I am crying today, mourning the loss of our spiritual father,” Spyridon Georgantis was quoted as saying by Reuters.

“He safeguarded our faith and our Greekness,” he said.

Schools, courts and public services were closed on Thursday.

Archbishop Christodoulos was a colourful and controversial figure, says the BBC’s Malcolm Brabant in Greece.

Archbishop Christodoulos paid a historic visit to the Vatican in 2006

He defended the Church’s pre-eminent role in the state and upheld Hellenism - the national character and culture of Greece, our correspondent says.

But critics said that under Archbishop Christodoulos, Greece remained a country which discriminated against those who were not Orthodox, including Catholics and worshippers of other branches of Christianity.

Elected as church leader in 1998, Archbishop Christodoulos was known as a fierce and outspoken defender of Greece and the role of the Orthodox Church within it, our correspondent says.

The archbishop once said that when ancient Greeks were creating the lights of civilisation, Europeans were living in trees.

He said Greeks lived in paradise compared to other Europeans because they had a strong faith, built churches, followed traditions and resisted globalisation.

Archbishop Christodoulos opposed Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, describing the Turks as barbarians.

AFP: Afghanistan may plunge into ‘failed state,’ experts warn, January 30, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Insurgency-wracked Afghanistan will become a failed state if urgent steps are not taken to tackle a deteriorating security situation and lackluster reconstruction and governance efforts, experts warned in separate reports Wednesday.

The reports came amid new concerns over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s commitment to providing more troops to fight a resurgent Taliban militia, with Canada’s prime minister warning in talks with US President George W. Bush that it might pull troops from Afghanistan unless NATO boosts support.

“Urgent changes are required now to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failing or failed state,” cautioned one report from the Atlantic Council of the United States, led by retired Marine Corps general James Jones.

Taliban control of the sparsely populated parts of Afghanistan was “increasing” and civil reforms, reconstruction, and development work “have not gained traction” across the country, especially in the south, it said.

“To add insult to injury, of every dollar of aid spent on Afghanistan, less than ten percent goes directly to Afghans, further compounding reform and reconstruction problems,” the report said.

Southern Afghanistan has seen the worst violence since the Taliban were ousted from power in the US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 terror attacks masterminded by Al-Qaeda, whose leaders were given sanctuary by the Taliban.

As US and NATO-led troops wage an uphill battle now to keep the Taliban at bay, civil sector reform “is in serious trouble” despite immense resources poured into the country and nearly seven years of efforts, the report said.

BBC NEWS, Afghan MPs back blasphemy death, January 30, 2008

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan.

Pervez Kambaksh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge.

The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

The Afghan government has said that the sentence was not final.

A government spokesman said recently that the case would be handled “very carefully”.

Now the Afghan Senate has issued a statement on the case - it was not voted on but was signed by its leader, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, an ally of President Hamid Karzai.

It said the upper house approved the death sentence conferred on Mr Kambaksh by a city court in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Harper’s Weekly

An engraving depicting an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau as a peacemaker between blacks and whites after the Civil War.

William Grimes, The Bloody Shirt - Stephen Budiansky - Book Review - New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008

In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”

Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.

All but one, the brilliant Confederate general James Longstreet, are unknown today. Prince R. Rivers, a literate former slave, was a South Carolina legislator and a judge in a largely black town, Hamburg, a target of white wrath. Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, served as governor of Mississippi until, after a campaign of violence and fraud, he was driven from office by impeachment in 1875.

Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who earned particular scorn by marrying a black woman, came to Mississippi to seek his fortune and stayed to serve as a state legislator and sheriff of Yazoo County. Lewis Merrill, an Army major, was sent to the South to put down violence by the Ku Klux Klan and the white rifle clubs engaged in a spreading insurgency.

All five men would fail. They would witness, as Ames put it, “the political death of the Negro.”

Mr. Budiansky, a military historian, does not inspire confidence at the outset. In a fierce prologue he reviews the sorry record of white resistance to Reconstruction, a campaign of terror that took the lives of more than 3,000 freedmen and their white allies, and heaps scorn on those who would invoke wounded Southern honor as a defense.

Sara Roy and Eyyad El Sarraj, Ending the stranglehold on Gaza, Boston Globe, January 26, 2008
AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez, Israel’s border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny territory by Israel’s military establishment and want to see an end to the
Israel’s minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off Gaza’s “infrastructural oxygen” - water, electricity, and fuel - as a response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday, Ramon’s wish came true: Israel’s blockade forced Gaza’s only power plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, agrees with Ramon’s strategy, saying that it is “inconceivable that life in Gaza continues to be normal.” The rapid and deepening desperation of Gaza’s sick and hungry is of no moral concern to her. For Livni, like Ramon, the siege is a tactical measure, a human experiment to stop the rockets and bring down a duly elected government.

The siege on Gaza and the West Bank began after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory with an international diplomatic and financial boycott of the new Hamas-led government. Development assistance was severely reduced with the improbable aim of bringing about a popular uprising against the very government just elected to power. Instead, this collective punishment resulted in a steady deterioration of Palestinian life, in growing lawlessness, and a violent confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, which escalated into a Hamas military takeover of Gaza in June 2007.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India party reserves women posts, January 29, 2008

Party leader Sushma Swaraj described the move as “historic” and a step towards “empowerment of women”.

The BJP and ruling Congress have backed reservation of a third of parliamentary seats for women since 1999.

The bill has been put forward several times, but has never been passed through parliament.

The proposal to reserve 33% of seats in the federal parliament and state assemblies has met with stiff resistance from several smaller parties.

Analysts say that the BJP and Congress parties’ support for reservation in parliament and state assemblies has also been unconvincing because they did not have enough women in their party positions.

Now the BJP has announced that it will give a third of party positions to women workers and senior party leaders said the party constitution would be amended to allow for the change.

“This [decision] will go down as a historic one … and it will be mentioned in the history of women’s empowerment in India,” BJP leader Sushma Swaraj said.

Women MPs make up only 8% of the present lower house of the Indian parliament.

Radio Australia - Asia Pacific - AFGHANISTAN: Journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy, January 28, 2008

In Afghanistan, a young journalism student has been sentenced to death for blasphemy, after allegedly distributing an article on why Muslim women can’t have more than one husband. Judges in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif accuse 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh of humiliating Islam by giving copies of the article to his fellow students. But the media advocacy group which employs Mr Kaambakhsh’s brother Yacoub says the young student’s being targeted to persuade his brother to stop reporting on human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Presenter - Corinne Podger Speaker - Jared Ferrie, Institute of War and Peace Reporting in Kabul

FERRIE: He’s accused of downloading a number of copies and articles from the internet. My understanding is that the article was critical of the way that women are treated according to Islam. So he’s been accused of downloading this article, printing it out and distributing it at the university. And so the charge against him is blasphemy.

PODGER: IWPR believes his sentence has nothing to do with distributing an article about gender in Islam, but it’s rather a punishment or intimidation aimed at his brother who workers with you?

FERRIE: Right, he denies that he downloaded this article and distributed it. What he and his brother Yacoub are assuming is that this is actually an indirect attack at Yacoub, and Yacoub is a journalist with IWPR, and he’s done a number of controversial stories over the years. For example, on warlord essentially who are, one in particular is a member of parliament and he’s been accused of all sorts of abuses, basically Yacoub in his stories has exposed a number of human rights abuses that have taken place and his stories points a finger at this fellow in particular. Another one was on the sexual exploitation of young boys, it’s apparently a common practice in certain parts of the country where warlords will actually take a young boy of maybe 13 or 14 and essentially use the young boy as a sex slave. So Yacoub did a story which indicated that the practice is actually quite widespread and growing in certain parts of northern Afghanistan. Certainly Yacoub has faced intimidation and threats over the years. He’s thinking that this is actually an indirect act at him, after his brother was imprisoned the authorities came to Yacoub’s home and they demanded to see his notes for particular stories, his sources, they wanted him to open up his computer and show them his information, which he refused to do. Certainly there are connections between warlords and people in the government, some of whom are warlords and the judicial system which is in Afghanistan known to be quite corrupt. So it certainly is possible, I’m not saying this, we don’t have the facts at this point, but it certainly is possible that the judiciary is being used by certain powerful people to actually persecute Yacoub and his brother.

Jonathan Yardley, washingtonpost.com, January 27, 2008

Review of THE BLOODY SHIRT: Terror After Appomattox, By Stephen Budiansky.Viking. 322 pp. $27.95

The decade-long period known as Reconstruction, which began shortly after the Civil War and ended with the presidential election of 1876, probably has been subjected to more misinterpretation, misunderstanding and outright factual distortion than any other time in American history. For a variety of reasons, including white Southern mythologizing and national indifference to the desperate situation of the former slaves, beginning in the late 19th century fictions about Reconstruction gained not merely wide popular acceptance but also the endorsement of many prominent historians, who gave them legitimacy and staying power.

These fictions presented the white South not as instigator, perpetuator and defender of black slavery, but as the victim of politically motivated mistreatment by “carpetbaggers” and other outsiders dispatched by Radical Republicans in Washington to wreak vengeance on the South. By contrast with the rapacious industrial North, the South was portrayed as — in the words of one historian — “a garden for the cultivation of all that was grand in oratory, true in science, sublime and beautiful in poetry and sentiment, and enlightened and profound in law and statesmanship.” Slavery metamorphosed from a “peculiar” institution into a benevolent one, and it was argued that only the South could hope to help the former slaves because “the Southern white man is the only man on earth who understands the Negro character.” If only the North had left the South to settle its own problem, the fictions contended, everything would have been fine. If Reconstruction failed, the fault lay solely with the North.

I remember all too well being force-fed this poppycock in the late 1950s at the University of North Carolina by a distinguished old professor who so ardently embraced the anti-Reconstruction argument that he might as well have been waving the bloody shirt, a time-honored phrase employed by political demagogues to accuse their opponents of association with violence. As Stephen Budiansky notes at the outset of this book, “the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of bloodstained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands” was just that — a fiction — but it gained wide currency in the white South during Reconstruction as a metaphor for what was seen as the cruelty, cowardice and hypocrisy of the Northern conquerors. Obviously, there was no such thing as a monolithic “white South,” and opinion on these matters was scarcely unanimous, but “distorted memories of Reconstruction” were more the rule than the exception, even among many white Southerners who were more open to sectional reconciliation than were the diehards.

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press

Palestinians carried goods from Egypt back to Gaza on Friday, passing a damaged section of the Rafah border wall.

Steven Erlanger, Egypt Tries to Plug Border; Gazans Poke New Hole - New York Times, January 26, 2008

GAZA — Egypt tried to restore its border with Gaza on Friday, stationing riot police officers in an effort to block Palestinians from entering. But Palestinians used a bulldozer to knock down another portion of the wall separating Egypt and Gaza.

The Egyptians announced on loudspeakers that the border would be closed at various times of the day on Friday, but allowed Palestinians who were inside Egypt to return to Gaza laden with goods, even as cranes lifted pallets of supplies over another part of the border barricade. The barrier on the Egyptian side is a low concrete wall topped with barbed wire.There were small clashes throughout the day, with short episodes of rock-throwing. Egyptians fired guns into the air and aimed water cannons above the heads of the those in the crowd to keep them back. The new breaches in the wall were large enough for cars and trucks to drive through, and some Egyptian guards then retreated.

Egypt is under pressure from Israel and the United States to restore the international border and regulate it, but does not want to use excessive force against the Gazans, whom the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, has insisted are starving under the pressure of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel.

But often in the past, Egypt has used force, including water cannons and automatic-rifle fire, against Palestinians who have breached the border, and the government will be calculating when its effort to respond generously to a crisis veers into instability or chaos. Nor does Egypt want responsibility for serving the population of Gaza, removing the burden from Israel.

Tony Judt, The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe - The New York Review of Books, Feb. 14, 2008

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”[2] In one sense she was, of course, absolutely correct. After World War I Europeans were traumatized by the memory of death: above all, death on the battlefield, on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The poetry, fiction, cinema, and art of interwar Europe were suffused with images of violence and death, usually critical but sometimes nostalgic (as in the writings of Ernst Jünger or Pierre Drieu La Rochelle). And of course the armed violence of World War I leached into civilian life in interwar Europe in many forms: paramilitary squads, political murders, coups d’état, civil wars, and revolutions.

After World War II, however, the worship of violence largely disappeared from European life. During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians (a large share of the deaths during World War II occurred not in battle but under the aegis of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide). And the utter exhaustion of all European nations—winners and losers alike—left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain, of course, was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale. The question of how human beings could do this to each other—and above all the question of how and why one European people (Germans) could set out to exterminate another (Jews) —were, for an alert observer like Arendt, self-evidently going to be the obsessive questions facing the continent. That is what she meant by “the problem of evil.”

Amos Elon, Olmert & Israel: The Change - The New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008

Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007
by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. Nation Books, 531 pp., $29.95

Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse
by Sylvain Cypel. Other Press, 574 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life
by Meron Benvenisti, translated from the Hebrew by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, in consultation with Michael Kaufman-Lacusta. University of California Press, 253 pp., $27.50.

1.

Israel under Ehud Olmert is not what it was under Ariel Sharon, at least in tone. Sharon was a soldier who spent much of his life fighting the Arabs. Olmert is a suave corporate lawyer, a deal maker, a political operator. Sharon supported the “Greater Israel” movement. Olmert’s idea of Israel is not the replay of a biblical vision but a secular modern state with a booming economy, integrated into global commerce and closely linked to Europe. This does not mesh well with what God and Abraham discussed in the Bronze Age. Sharon spoke of a long and difficult struggle. Olmert says Israelis are “tired of war, tired of being victors.”[1] When he speaks, as he often does, of two states, Palestine and Israel, the hard-liners are full of rage.

Olmert may be the most pragmatic Israeli leader since 1967. One hopes he does not come too late. According to Haaretz, he told an American delegation recently that in “Israel there are perhaps 400,000 people who maintain the state, leaders in the economy, in science and in culture. I want to make sure they have hope, that they’ll stay here.” His own two sons, it is well known, live in New York. He is the first Israeli premier who has expressed some empathy for the Palestinian tragedy. In his speech in Annapolis in late November, he said, “We are not indifferent to [the Palestinians’] suffering.” It is true that the next morning eight Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army but it is impossible to overlook what seems, at least, the beginning of a change. The leftist Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy was uncharacteristically optimistic, wondering whether perhaps an Israeli de Klerk was emerging here.

Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Gaza border breach shows Israel that Hamas is in charge - Haaretz, January 24, 2008

A few Israel Defense Forces Engineering Corps officers surely shed a tear yesterday while viewing the television reports from Rafah: The barrier built by the IDF with blood and sweat along the Philadelphi Route, on the Gaza Strip border with Egypt, was coming down.

It was, apparently, the final remnant of Israel’s years of occupying the Strip. But Israel has better reasons to be worried by what happened yesterday. In destroying the wall separating the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of Rafah, Hamas chalked up a real coup. Not only did the organization demonstrate once again that it is a disciplined, determined entity, and an opponent that is exponentially more sophisticated than the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also took the sting out of the economic blockade plan devised by Israel’s military establishment, an idea whose effectiveness was doubtful from the beginning but whose potential for international damage was not.

Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are now forced to find a new joint border control arrangement, one that will probably depend on the good graces of Hamas. If the PA is indeed interested in taking responsibility for the border crossings, as Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has declared, it will have to negotiate with Hamas even though President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to avoid that at any cost. The other option - to leave the border untended - is even worse.

The Hamas action yesterday was anything but spontaneous. It was another stage in the campaign that began in Gaza’s night of darkness on Sunday. As Gaza was plunged into widely televised blackness, Palestinian children armed with candles were brought out on a protest march and organized into prime-time demonstrations in support of the Egyptian and Jordanian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press

Palestinians Topple Gaza Wall and Cross to Egypt - New York Times, January 24, 2008

RAFAH, Egypt — Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed into northern Egypt on Wednesday after Hamas militants blew up parts of the fence dividing Egypt from the Gaza Strip, forcing an end to the closing of Gaza that had followed Hamas’s takeover of the territory last summer.

On foot, bicycle, donkey cart and pickup truck, Gazans crossed the border for a buying spree of medicine, cement, sheep, Coca-Cola, gasoline, soap, Cleopatra and Malimbo cigarettes, satellite dishes and countless other supplies that have been cut off, especially in recent days during a complete blockade by Israel after rocket attacks from Gaza.

From the breach of the border wall before dawn until well into the evening, Palestinians crossed from Rafah in Gaza to Rafah in Egypt — the city has been divided by the border since 1982, when Egypt accepted the return of Sinai from Israel but declined to take back Gaza as well.

Dion Nissenbaum’s Blog: Checkpoint Jerusalem, January 23, 2008

Mahmoud Abu Ghalion sat in a Gaza City kitchen, debating whether or not to join the throngs of Palestinians flooding over the broken border into Egypt.

“You know,” the young property manager said, “I feel better just knowing that we can leave. I can breathe easier.”

“See,” said one of his friends, “we are chasing the illusion of freedom.”

Palestinian militants may have created a temporary escape valve for Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. But the seven-month-old standoff is far from over.

“This is how pathetic the situation has become that people have to literally break out of Gaza just to get food and fuel,” said John Ging, the Gaza City-based director of the United Nations refugee agency. “There is no dignity for anybody.”

While walking along the toppled border wall and watching Egyptian soldiers directing Palestinians to the places they were allowed to cross into Egypt, an older man with bad teeth and scruffy white beard came up to me and opened up a small sack.

Inside was a small box of dish washing soap he had bought in Egypt.

Look at what we are reduced to, said the Palestinian man.

While Palestinians were streaming past Egyptian border guards and off on their Egyptian shopping expeditions, Israel was again cutting off the flow of fuel for Gaza’s only power plant.

Israel delivered less fuel than expected and the power plant operators said tonight that they may have to shut down one of their generators as soon as Thursday to conserve fuel for a few days. That means it will be producing about half the amount of power. That means more Gaza City blackouts.

And even a one-day Egyptian shopping spree is only going to get families so far. Without a political solution that creates normal borders, Gaza residents will very quickly run out of supplies once again.

Late tonight, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed little sympathy.

“There is no justification or basis to demand that we allow the residents of Gaza to live normal lives while mortars are fired and missiles are launched from their streets and the courtyards of their homes towards Sderot and the communities in the South,” said Olmert.

For now, the open border is proving to be a much-needed escape valve for Palestinians.