Smuggling, Tunnels, Denial, Oh My!

More than 40 Taliban militants escaped from a southern Afghanistan prison by digging a 30-foot-long tunnel and with apparent help from officials, regional leaders said Saturday.

Ah, "tunnel". An old buzzword. This brings me to want to discuss the smuggling tunnels that Israel tried to penetrate yesterday while the real criminals, the "Palestinians", villified Israel for trying to destroy them.

Just think back when, under the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel opened an exit to an already existing tunnel by the Western Wall. It caused a riot by the local Arabs and was condemned worldwide.

The world has already forgotten all about the Palestinian Authority's failed attempt to smuggle 50 tons of Iranian-supplied weapons and explosives into Gaza on board the Karine A.

The world has also forgotten all about how Palestinians smuggle suicide bombers in ambulances.

And that State Department officials have said that Hizbullah smuggles cocaine from Latin America to Europe and the Middle East.

And that Arafat, while a student on campus, helped to smuggle firearms and explosives into Israel and its surrounding regions and as a direct result of that, in 1959, established the Fatah movement, whose major objective was to destroy the state of Israel.

The world is inured to the phrase "Palestinian gunman" which has become such a staple of Middle East coverage that everyone seems to have forgotten that the category has been illegal since Sept. 13, 1993, when Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace agreement at the White House. That document says (in Article XIV, Paragraph 4) that no one other than the Palestinian police force and Israeli military may "manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder or any related equipment." There is no evidence that the Palestinian Authority has ever enforced it.

What's more, the widespread presence of guns in Palestinian territories doesn't just prove that the PA failed to control the weapons Oslo allowed it to have—it also settles the question the Karine A raised by making it clear that the PA is intimately involved in smuggling weapons and at least knowingly looks the other way. Under Oslo, the Israelis did give the PA police force 15,000 Kalyshnikovs. Under Oslo, every M-16 you see in Palestinian hands is illegal.

Now about those smuggling tunnels; the IDF has frequently uncovered and destroyed Palestinian tunnels constructed at the Egypt-Israel border in the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip. These tunnels are used to smuggle weapons, cigarettes, drugs, and people (primarily prostitutes) from Egypt into Gaza. The Rafah tunnels are typically dug inside residential homes, and are concealed under bathrooms, living rooms, and bedrooms.

On October 12, 2001, two tunnel entrances were discovered inside a child's bedroom. Another such tunnel was uncovered on September 12, 2002.

But none of this matters.

What we do know is that the appearance of modern assault weapons used by Palestinians to gun down innocent Jewish men, women, children and infants, isn't just a main cause of concern — it is indicative evidence of smuggling and confirms, again, the righteousness with which Israel defends itself.