Foreign Policy
Gaza’s tragically peculiar economy: When I was in Gaza in January I had an opportunity to both speak with tunnel operators and view the tunnels themselves. One can’t help but be struck by how ubiquitous the tunnel trade has become. Most of what one buys in Gaza seems to have come through a tunnel: shoes, clothing, chocolate bars, utensils, appliances. Even fiancés, livestock, automobiles, and a lion have been brought into Gaza this way. (The drugged but uncaged lion, it seems, woke up part way across. After puzzling how to recapture it, smugglers built two halves of a makeshift cage, which were then separately lowered into the tunnel from the Gaza and Egyptian ends, and very, very carefully pushed together.)
