…This whole tunnel business at the southern end of the Gaza rectangle I find simply as bizarre as anything Lewis Carroll came up with in Wonderland. Why can’t these Arabs, on both sides of that fence, manage in a civilized manner a normal civilized border crossing? The tunnels system is simply institutionalized and tolerated smuggling. You know Arafat’s father in the 1920s was also involved in smuggling between Egypt and Gaza. It is a way of life for the Bedouin in the Sinai Wilderness. How interesting, how ironic, that HaShem chose the Sinai Wilderness for the giving of the Torah, His teaching at Mt. Sinai, calling for a way of life more civilized than any known on earth in 14th Century before the Common Era.

The Torah was given at Har Sinai; the Jews went on from there and have lived by it for over 3,000 years of contributing to the advancement of civilization, giving birth to Christendom and Islam, so much of the world now, while the Sinai Wilderness remains one of the wildest on the earth, a peninsula of outlaws, renegades from sedentary civilization for whom borders between peoples mean nothing. And the violation of laws like against smuggling elicits no twinge of guilt or bad conscience about engaging in such criminal activity…