Remember the Fall of the Berlin Wall?

Remember the fall of the Berlin wall? Well, here is a news item that should remind people of that seminal event:

The New York Times reports: "Thousands of Palestinians streamed over the Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip into Egypt on Wednesday, after a border fence was toppled, and went on a spree of buying fuel and other supplies that have been cut off from their territory by Israel. They used donkeys, carts and motorcycles to cross the border, and streamed back over the fallen fence laden with goods they had been unable to buy in Gaza. The scene at the border was one of a great bazaar. The streets were packed, and people were bringing into Gaza everything from soap and cigarettes to goats, chickens, medicine, mattresses and car paint."

Predictably, the Israeli government puts it all down to terrorism: Arye Mekel, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, commented: “The danger is that Hamas and other terror organizations will take advantage of the situation to smuggle in weapons and men and make a bad situation in Gaza worse.”

But let's face it. The population of Gaza is living in an open-air prison, vulnerable to the whims of the Israeli government which controls everything that goes in and out of Gaza. Those whims include bombardments, incursions and, recently, a cutoff of all supplies, damn the consequences. Such actions, patently illegal under international law, will never end Palestinian hostility toward Israel. Palestinians will try to get access to indispensable supplies. And some will be even more motivated to use violence. Ultimately, you can't starve a population into submission.

When the Berlin Wall tumbled down, it irreversibly changed the course of recent history in Europe. This opening of the Gaza wall, sadly, is unlikely to weigh so heavily on the course of human events. But it is to be hoped that more people wake up to the ongoing human tragedy on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.