Khaled Abu Toameh is not your typical Palestinian journalist. He began his career at one of Yasser Arafat’s newspapers and today he writes for the Jerusalem Post.
Read it all. Among the many points he makes is that the tunnels in Gaza are not only for weapons, they are for EVERYTHING.
Smuggling is a business. We're doing Hamas an injustice by saying they're the ones who established the tunnels. These tunnels have been there since 1967. In the 1970s I visited some of the tunnels. In the 1980s I visited the tunnels. When Arafat was there I visited the tunnels. These tunnels are part of the culture. It's a cultural thing over there. If you have your own tunnel it's like you have your own business. Hamas now takes taxes and gives people a license to build their tunnel.
This is also explored in this article from Sarah A. Topol in The New Republic. Of course, one always identifies with bootleggers who are distributing potato chips and chocolates. The Iranian rocket parts are, alas, part of the package.
When I am reading about the Net as The New Human Network half the time and then reading about this stuff, a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in. Like the tribesmen in The Ape Within who immediately seize upon the introduction of an airplane as a method of dropping boulders on their rivals, the new tools will not automatically lead us to The Age Of Aquarius.
