Israel eases its Gaza blockade, smuggling tunnels go unused

I've written quite a bit in the past about the flourishing smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt which supplied the blockaded territory with goods not available through legitimate trade (one source put the number at 90%, though I can't vouch for this figure). The tunnels were dangerous and Hamas was known to tax them, but they served their purpose.

It looks like now, however, they are falling into disuse as Israel has eased its blockade:

"Israel now allows more food, different kinds of it, juice, electrical equipment and even fridges, therefore merchants shifted their business to the old regular way and abandoned tunnels," he added.

Israel relaxed its restrictions in June in the wake of its raid to halt a blockade-running flotilla from reaching Gaza in a military operation that killed nine activists and drew widespread international condemnation.

While counterfactuals are difficult, this easing appears to be a direct result of the Gaza flotilla raid and the attention that it brought to the situation. At the time, I thought the activists were drawing more attention to themselves than anything else – there were way more people on the "aid" boats than there needed to be, and the used clothing and toys that made up the bulk of the cargo were relatively useless. But I suppose now that the blockade has been eased, I stand corrected.

Gaza's proliferating tunnels

Foreign Policy has an excellent article about the ubiquitous smuggling tunnels sustaining the Gazan economy. Apparently the smuggling market has become incredibly saturated:

One smuggler, who used to ply his business in the days of the Israeli occupation when a single shipment of weapons could earn him $5,000, bemoaned the fact that there were so many tunnels these days that he barely earned $50 per load. Indeed, some commodities are now actually cheaper than when they were imported from Israel, with the lower cost of goods originating from Egypt offsetting the cost of smuggling them in. On the days when the [Palestinian Authority] pays salaries and Gazans go shopping, some tunnel operators find it more profitable to drive a taxi.

Apparently the banalization of the tunnels has been pretty complete:

This set the stage for a number of fraudulent schemes that came to light last summer, with Gazans of modest means investing in tunnels that turned out not to exist. Tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen in this way, and some suggested senior members of Hamas might somehow be implicated. The Hamas government arranged partial compensation of the victims.

For all previous posts on the Gazan smuggling tunnels, check the archive.

Hasidic Jews, ecstasy, and prostitutes

So this might be almost a decade old and a bit esoteric for some, but I found a fascinating article today on the former Israeli ecstasy kingpin Jacob "Cookie" Orgad, who had Hasidic school boys and strippers ferrying drugs across the Atlantic for him and ended up as a rabbi behind bars. The whole thing is almost too good to excerpt, so before I remember all the other great parts, here are two that stood out:

As much as 90 percent of the world’s ecstasy supply is manufactured in secret, high-tech labs scattered throughout the Netherlands, where the materials to make the hallucinogen [ed.: ecstasy isn't actually a hallucinogen] are not as closely regulated as they are in the rest of Europe and the United States. For years, a cabal of Israelis have used Holland as a base for diamond smuggling through the ports in Antwerp and Rotterdam. In the mid-nineties, some of them noticed that an even more lucrative trade had blossomed around them, one with few players as well positioned to cash in as they were. "Israelis are everywhere, and they get to know each other very fast because of the language and the tradition," says an Israeli intelligence official familiar with his countrymen’s stronghold on the world ecstasy market. "It doesn’t take long for a guy like Cookie to get big."

According to documents seized by the feds, Cookie began making frequent trips to Amsterdam, where he set up a connection with a Dutch chemist who had a lab in an industrial building north of the city. The ecstasy trade was quickly consolidating as well-connected players staked out their markets. The alleged former diamond smuggler Israeli Oded Tuito was already said to control much of Miami. Tuito also had a major piece of the New York market, along with Ilan Zarger (also an Israeli) who was the head of BTS, the notorious Brooklyn Terror Squad infamous for beating and robbing clubgoers and other dealers to insure their dominance of the market.

Something that annoyed me, though – and this happens with most reporting on drugs – is when journalists take the police's value estimations seriously. The police will always take the highest price they've ever seen for a drug – retail! – and then multiply that by the total amount. At one point, the article claims a pill can sell for as high as $40 – an absurdly high price that you couldn't even get a gullible and rich 13-year-old to pay. At another point it claims that the street value of 9 million pills is more than $27 million, implying an average retail price of $30 per pill. In actuality, you can only get away with selling a pill for even $20 if you're taking great risk and vending within some sort of music event (generally on the dance floor itself). The further away you get from the probing eyes of security, the lower the price. So, a pill bought on the dance floor will be more expensive than a pill bought outside the venue, which will in turn be more expensive than you'd get it for at a huge festival (where there are even fewer police), all of which is more expensive than if you buy it from a normal dealer in the outside world. Generally at that point the price will fall to around $10/pill.

With his Nobel, Obama will slay the communists and the godless

Here's Thorbjørn Jagland, head of the committee that issued the award, comparing what Obama's about to do to the fall of the Berlin wall, which liberated (to various extents) the 300 million people of the Eastern Bloc:

He compared the selection of Mr. Obama with the award in 1971 to the then West German Chancellor Willy Brandt for his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with communist eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Mr. Jagland said.

Not to be outdone, Shimon Peres comes dangerously close to calling Obama the messiah:

[A]nother laureate, President Shimon Peres of Israel, sent a letter to President Obama on Friday morning, saying: “Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such a profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth.”

And the tunnels are rebuilt

Just a few days after the cease-fire and already the tunnels are being rebuilt between Egypt and Gaza. The tunnels began sprouting like Saudi princes after Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip and Egypt followed suit (remember: it takes two to tango). Though it appears that most of the goods moving from Egypt to Gaza through the tunnels are commercial, there does seem to have been weapons smuggling.

Though Israel supposedly went to war partially to destroy the tunnels (and destroy them they did), they must realize that they don't actually want the smuggling to come to an end. If the tunnels supply even close to 90% of the imports into Gaza as some claim, their total abandonment would result in starvation on a scale that Israel could never tolerate. Egypt has little incentive to close the tunnels because of the brisk trade that it brings to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, and likely doesn't want the vilification that it would receive from its own population if it were complicit in starving Gaza into Hamas' surrender (an unlikely scenario to begin with). I predict that the "heavy international pressure" on Egypt to prevent smuggling will turn out to be not heavy enough, and that the tunnels will be there as long as the blockade will be there.

Hamas' war crimes go unreported

Noah Pollak at Commentary says it best:

Allow me to propose a metric for evaluating whether a journalist is behaving responsibly or not: If he reports that Israel bombed a UN school and killed 30 civilians, he is irresponsible. If he reports that Hamas used a UN school as a weapons cache and base of operations for launching mortars at the IDF, and the IDF’s return fire killed the Hamas cell along, tragically, with a yet-unspecified number of civilians, then he is behaving responsibly. If he wishes to be particularly scrupulous, he might additionally note that Hamas had rigged the school with explosives which detonated after the IDF took out the mortar team, killing a large additional number of civilians. And he might add that you can go to the IDF’s Youtube channel to view footage from 2007 of Hamas using the very same school as a mortar-launching base.

HT: Michael Totten.

It takes two to tango/besiege Gaza

Anshel Pfeffer has a take on the Gaza "siege" which, embarrassingly enough, I never considered: Israel cannot unilaterally impose a siege on the Gaza Strip, as it shares a land border with Egypt as well as with Israel.

In all the talk of the siege, blockade and humanitarian disaster of Gaza, one small inconvenient detail almost always goes unmentioned. Gaza has a second border in addition to the one with Israel: a small but potentially useful border with its Arab sister, Egypt. [...]

A well-regulated and secure crossing at Rafah could have solved most of the current problems. It could have let through normal food and medical supplies for the Palestinians, allowed them travel and made a mockery of the claims that Israel and its allies have turned the Strip into a gigantic prison.

But despite signing the Philadelphi Agreement that allowed it to station many more troops in the demilitarised Sinai peninsula, and receiving European assistance to control the border-crossing, Egypt has failed to police it. Instead it sealed the border and forced back Palestinians who tried to break through. This was also a misguided policy on the part of Israel, which urged and supported the Egyptian blockade.

Thoughts on Gaza: Iran's role, the civilian death toll, the smuggling tunnels, and proportionality

Here are a few unrelated thoughts on the recent Gaza conflict:

• About two few weeks before Israel's air raid, defense officials were saying that Iran had been pushing Hamas to not renew its cease-fire with Israel. This is in contrast to Hamas' traditional sponsor, Egypt, who evidently did not want war. Further evidence of Iran's new role as the Middle East's biggest direct sponsor of terror. But who knows if the buck stops there.
• The UN says that 62 Palestinian women and children were killed in the Israeli air raids, meaning that total civilian casualties are likely higher. 320 Palestinians in total have been killed, the (vast?) majority of whom appear to have been employed by Hamas.
• Israel has destroyed 40 smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza. The tunnels could supply as much as 90% of Gaza's economic activity, and are an increasingly lucrative source of revenue for Hamas, which taxes and controls at least some of the smuggling trade. Food, fuel, cigarettes, medicine, and weapons seem to be the most popular goods going through the tunnels. The weapons smuggling business, though, had dried up in the beginning of this year, as Hamas routed Fatah in the Gaza Strip and got control of their weapons.
• Many people have remarked at the inanity of criticizing Israel for being "disproportionate" in its attacks – here is an example of the logic. I don't know how relevant I think it is, but Totten does convincingly argue that "proportionality" is an irrelevant red herring.

Hamas's lucrative tunnels

Israel put the Gaza Strip under siege a year ago when Hamas took power in a coup, but the siege looks to have some pretty counterproductive unintended consequences: Hamas has been heavily taxing the tunnels which are used to smuggle consumer goods ands over from Egypt, and has been operating tunnels itself to maintain its supply of weapons:

Hamas imposes stiff taxes on the tons of contraband that flow beneath the border each night, collecting revenue from the tunnels to fill its own coffers, according to those involved in the trade and international observers. Hamas also gets to decide who receives scarce supplies, allowing it to consolidate its authority. All the while, the group has used its control to commandeer tunnels of its own, ensuring a steady supply of weapons to use in its attacks against Israel.

Israel's rationale is pretty standard: they're hoping that the people will turn on Hamas. And they are – less than 40% support Hamas's leader Ismail Haniyeh, compared with 56% for Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas. But, considering Gaza isn't a democracy, this turn in public opinion isn't enough to change the government, or its stance.

The Israelis come off as hapless, arguing so vigorously for control on the arms coming into Gaza (it was a condition of the maybe truce), while utterly ignoring the economic power that the blockade brings to Hamas. The organization has found the tunnels to be an effective way of collecting taxes, and it has the deleterious effect of severing the connection between taxation and consent to govern. Though they're "well aware of the massive scale of the smuggling and that Hamas benefits from it," the Israelis don't seem terribly concerned:

"The best thing from our point of view is that there would be no smuggling of ammunition. We don't care about the other things," said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel's Defense Ministry.