Is Raf OK? -- Installment #106

2024-04-28 -- Jerusalem

Apr 28, 2024

Tags: 4 Min Read; Videos; Jumbo Relief...

It's the end of the Pesach week. Tonight starts the last festival day, which is bad news for my humor supply... Black humor struggles to digest half a year of war….

The country is war-weary. The leadership deficit is felt viscerally by all. Once upon a time, in my business life, two companies were duking it out in the Contact Management software space. Victory often flowed to the side with better marketing and messaging, even when their product was materially worse. In politics and communal spheres, success often flows simply from avoiding unforced errors (read: decent leadership).

A comment heard this morning, "Even right wingers here are concerned/depressed that there is no plan for day-after-the-war-ends."

The other way of reading that is: The unforced error of failing on October 7 is compounded by the unforced error of no forward looking vision. In other words: Absence of Leadership.

Postmark...

Gaza

Gazan terrorists fired mortar shells on Wednesday towards the construction work on the humanitarian pier being built off the coast of Gaza.
Several pieces of American engineering equipment were damaged in the attack. In addition, one person was slightly injured while running to a protected area.

The Palestinian Ambassador in Egypt:

Between the beginning of the war through the end of March, 85,000 Palestinians left Gaza for Egypt.

On average, 700 people leave Gaza per day for Egypt through the Rafah crossing.

Given that Egypt is charging $5,000 per person to "coordinate" exit from Gaza... multiplied by 85,000 people... that is over US$400 million... someone is earning huge sums here... (Egyptian officers in charge of the Gaza border?)

Below: Gazans complaining on social media: The Americans are dropping Skittles that have expired in air drops...

Below: Auctioning cartons of cigarettes for high prices...

Because...

Cigarettes in Gaza

Gazans on social media: Hamas controls the import of cigarettes into the Gaza Strip through Rafah. And takes a cut...

It seemed for a moment that the introduction of cigarettes into the Gaza Strip would lower the prices of cigarettes, but Gazans report that the prices of cigarettes and tobacco have remained high and have even become more expensive. A pack of cigarettes that costs about 6 dollars duty free in Egypt costs over 150 dollars in Gaza. Gazan merchants claim that there is a Hamas committee that sits inside the Rafah crossing and determines the prices and what goods will enter. According to various testimonies, Gazan merchants were expelled from the crossing area so that they could not see how the receipt of goods from the Egyptian trucks is carried out, with an emphasis on the issue of cigarettes that allows Hamas to cut a fat cut of the sale at the expense of smokers.

Above: Rafah crossing: The hottest commodity in the Gaza Strip, worth millions to Hamas... Pallets of cigarettes.

Below (from Gaza social media): In the shadow of the rising prices for cigarettes in the Gaza Strip (over 40 NIS/US$10 for a single cigarette), one of the residents of the Gaza Strip decided to "recycle" empty cartridges of bullets fired by IDF soldiers and turn them into smoking utensils.... Now all that remains is to get tobacco... or another herb...

Syria

A Syrian channel identified with the Shia axis:

"Today will be 25 days since Israel's last attack in Damascus - the attack on the Iranian consulate that resulted in the death of Iranian officials and the Iranian response to Israel.
This is the longest quiet period in Damascus without Israeli attacks in several years. It seems the rules of the game have changed."

Yup. Israel has been bombing targets in Syria continually, for years... often to disrupt weapons flowing to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Columbia University

Something I have said (ad nauseam) to Israelis: "The protests in the U.S. are by a small, extremely vocal group." This position is supported by events at--of all places--Columbia University, where students just elected an Israeli student, Maya Platek, as student government president for the 2024-2025 school year. She said:

“Our classmates and professors choose to manipulate history in order to demonize us, as people have done all throughout history. They choose to rewrite our identity in order to justify terrorist regimes. They choose to cheer in our pain and in our suffering, and they choose to delegitimize the only Jewish state in the world when there are dozens of Christian and Muslim ones," Platek explained.

"They choose to advocate for our removal from this campus over our nationality. That is discrimination,” she proclaimed as she stood on a platform on the university’s campus.

Vancouver B.C.

Vancouver, Canada: A demonstration of Iranians against the Iranian regime, following recent death sentences handed down by Iranian judges to political prisoners, among them Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who dared to criticize the Ayatollahs' regime in his songs.
Note the differences between the quiet and polite demonstrations by the Iranian expatriates and the violent demonstrations of anti Israel students in the US and Canada.