Time Immortal

TheSpaceAdmiral, whom I haven’t heard from in a while, writes in with a few corrections to a previous article.

I think the premise of your “Egypt had a wall between it and Gaza” post is wrong. You say twice that the wall was built by Egypt, but Reuters seems pretty confident that the portion of wall blown up yesterday was built by Israel in 2004:

Residents of Rafah, a divided town straddling the Egypt-Gaza border, said militants set off explosions that demolished a 200-metre (200-yard) length of the rusting, six-meter-high (20-foot-high) metal border wall put up by Israel in 2004, a year before it pulled troops and settlers from the territory.

Egypt certainly does a lot to keep Palestinians out (and have made considerable efforts to seal the border), so you can argue that your broader point remains valid, but I still think jumping from “there is a wall on the Egypt-Gaza border” to “the Egyptians built a wall on the Egypt-Gaza.border” is a weird leap of logic.

Please note that I’m disputing the historical facts related to construction of the wall. I’m not trying to make some broader political point.

One works with the details one has on hand at the moment, and I didn’t take the time to look for more information about the Rafah wall. If it was built by Israel back in 2004, then it was built by Israel back in 2004 (I’m not usually willing to grant Reuters my complete trust, especially in regard to their objectivity where Israel is concerned, but the historical picture they present seems accurate upon further review).

So it appears that I goofed on a technical detail. My apologies, and I am grateful for the added details.

TheSpaceAdmiral is right, though, that this doesn’t really do any damage to the point of my previous article, which was to point out that there seems to be an awful lot of noise being made about the injustice of the Israel/Gaza wall, but no noise at all about how the Egypt/Gaza wall. There seems to be an awful lot of noise being made about Israel’s use of the wall as a security barrier, and no noise at all about how, until yesterday, Egypt was using the Rafah wall for essentially the same purpose.

That the Rafah wall was built by Israel is interesting, but also irrelevant in the grand scheme; they gave up control of the site when they withdrew their troops and civilians from the area. In effect, if not by act of construction, it was the Egyptians’ wall. Was, that is, until Hamas had a go at it.