The Guardian has a Bad Day

This morning the Guardian spun the story of the Egyptian sealing of their border with Gaza so as to blame Israel. The story starts out reasonably, but by its final paragraphs it has forgotten its original theme and is implying that Israel is the culprit, even though no facts are cited, merely claims of this UN chap and that one.

Future historians, should they ever attempt to unravel the sordid story of Gaza in the Era of Hamas will have quite a challenge with the reportage versus the facts on the ground - for example, how to square the natural tendency to blame Israel with the facts that many of the actions on the ground aren't being done by Israelis at all, but rather by Hamas, or the Egyptians, or Fatah, or Islamic Jihad... it's not easy to follow if you're a highly educated observer; for everyone else (I include myself) its not at all easy to follow, much less to understand.

By mid-morning there was a development everyone knew would happen - well, anyone consistently paying attention to the details. Which means there was absolutely no mention of the possibility anywhere I saw since the breaching of the Gaza-Egyptian border: not in the Guardian, not in the NYT, not on the BBC or CNN, not in the Economist, and not by Juan Cole - those are the media outlets I've been following. But readers of Haaretz knew it was coming, as did all the brainwashed Israeli public who don't base their knowledge on the fine foreign press.

Palestinian terrorists left Gaza into Egypt, headed south, and somewhere along the (relatively) long, empty, and peaceful border between Israel and Egypt they penetrated Israel and found their way to Dimona, where they committed a suicide attack. One innocent woman was murdered, and the second attacker was killed before he could kill anyone (he was already wounded, but since all it would have taken for him to kill was to push a button, he was correctly considered dangerous, and shot).

So why did I start by saying the Guardian had a bad day? Because the starkness of the story of this attack was so complete that there really wasn't any plausible way to spin it - so the Guardian told it as it happened.

My personal opinion, by the way, and here I'm far to the left of mainstream Israel, is that the appropriate Israeli response to the simple fact that Palestinian terrorists can and will penetrate our territory through Egypt is to build a fence there, too. It will cost money, lots of it, and it will permanently mar the beauty of the the dessert, but this seems preferable to me to forcing the Palestinians to stay in Gaza. We should fortify our defenses, and we should pressure the Egyptians, fellow Arabs and brothers and all that, to open their border with Gaza, and there should be an end to the chatter abot the prison of Gaza.