Nov 18, 2023
“Gaza has a common border with Egypt. Egypt is locking them in.” Amir Avivi, founder of the Israel Defence and Security forum, said in an interview with the BBC that Egypt is responsible for locking Palestinians in Gaza as it refuses to open the Rafah border crossing.
It goes back further than 1967. A third of the population wears the surname “al Masri” – including Mohammed “Deif” masquerading as an aborigiinal Palestine nationalist. There are also quite a few Hijazis and Mughrabis/Maghrebis. These are all families who were economic migrants to British Palestine because it is Economics 101 that labour migrates towards investment and in 1917 – 37 Zionists imported £100 million and in 1940 – 44 inc the British military spent a £100 million on infrastructure and services. These two sums are equal to £5 Billion each at least now. Then the dollar was four to a pound and since 1945 dollar inflation is something over tenfold.
In 1948 as the war of Israeli independence FROM the Arab World took hold primarily in the coastal plain and the shanty towns around TA, Jaffa and Haifa, the civil population if it could, left to stay with family in the hill country or in the case of the Egyptian (Masri), Saudi (Hijazi) or N. Africans (Mughrabi). In the same way many French people in summer 1940 fled South and as a young Town Hall clerk in 1970 I encountered people who remembered the Belgian refugees of WW I who fled into France and Britain as far North as Manchester.
The Egyptians had to agree to an Armistice in Jan 1949 because an IDF force under Yigal Alon had worked a flanker through Nitzana /el Auja into Sinai and bottled them. Consequently King Farouk – “the Crook” to British Tommies in Egypt – then closed the Egytian frontier and refused to let his own nationals “right of return” in order to create a problem for the international community by way of a revenge sulk for losing his bet in former British PAlestine.
This has been obvious to anyone that can read a map since 1967. The Egyptians refuse to open their border to the population of the Gaza Strip, just like the other Arab nations. that’s sad for the Palestinians because they could leave the Gaza strip quite easily through Rafah. However, if they were to do so, the human shield would be gone and the anti-Israeli narrative would be gone too. we can’t have that.