12/31
Got up around 6, walked around and got breakfast at a small restaurant. A beef and onions in a small pita thing cost 2.75 LE, it was pretty decent. Not much else opened up until 8 or 8:30, very different from Cairo where people are running around constantly.
Walked out to the beach, it was very pretty aside from the garbage that's strewn everywhere. An American aid program would probably win hearts and minds by paying people to clean the entire country and by purchasing trashcans and organizing an effective garbage collection system.
There was one couple walking around the beach, the woman fully covered while the guy dipped his feat in the water, which I assume was pretty cold. There were quite a few fishing boats as well going around everywhere, it was very picturesque. There were also a bunch of pagoda-looking things that jutted out into the water, around them were rocks and what I think must have been landing barriers that are no longer in use. The peace dividend, perhaps. I took a bunch of pictures of the beach, including some strangely out of place graffiti, but forgot to put them on my thumb drive before heading to the cybercafe.
Just bummed around for the rest of the day. I've been reading Sara Roy's Failing Peace while here. It's a collection of her peer-reviewed articles from various journals and five original chapters, it's very illuminating. Roy is a Harvard political economist and an expert on political Islam, and is also the world's leading expert on the effects of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinians. Her book The Gaza Strip: the Political Economy of De-Development is one of the most important I've ever read vis-a-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This one essentially updates her theory of de-development as it applies to Palestinian society and the economy through the Oslo years and into the second intifada.
Anyway, will try Rafah tomorrow...
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So why is Egypt finally building this security wall along their border with Gaza? Why has it taken the Egyptian government so long to finally do the bidding of the 'American-Zionist' government?
ReplyDeleteMaybe, Egypt decided, quite on it's own,that they'd had enough of Hamas. That all Egypt's efforts to bring Fatah and Hamas into a unity government have come to naught due to Hamas intransigence, and that Egypt is tired bending her knee to Iran and her Arab proxies?
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ReplyDeleteAh, Sara Roy. Another hypersensitive child of holocaust survivors. She and Norman Finkelstein, and Ken Roth and Shlomo Sand, and Abe Foxman
ReplyDelete(for that matter), lecturing the rest of us on morality. Maybe I'm wrong Feroze, but I believe that many children of survivors have emotional issues that make them less then perfect moral arbiters. Sorry if I've offended anyone.