Gaza, Egypt, and Israel

I don't normally post anything involving foreign affairs. The reason is that in my formative years of following current events, I found them to be dreadfully boring. My interests have since expanded, but I assume that people who don't get a kick out of our domestic political news would really hate anything about the rest of the world. So if you don't care, don't waste your time reading any more.

Since no one is left, here we go. There were some fascinating events in the Middle East last week. In the last few years, Israel has gotten tired of continual attacks on them by Palestinians living within their borders. In response, Israel basically gave them their own land to live in and rule as they choose (Gaza, from what I understand, though it's still technically part of Israel). Gaza is between Egypt and the rest of Israel, and it's sealed in between walls on both sides. The Egypt-Gaza wall was originally created by Israel for their own defense before they gave up the land. The Gaza-Greater Israel wall exists for obvious reasons.

Anyway, last week, after months of working on it, the Palestinians knocked down the wall to Egypt. The Egyptian government was completely surprised by this, and they have been unable to handle the effects of it. (Like most other Muslim Middle Eastern governments, they are completely incompetent in anything other than throwing oil money at fomenting terrorism around the world, except Egypt has no oil. Thus, they suck at pretty much everything.)

At first, I thought this was bad news for Israel, since the Palestinians could freely go back and forth into Egypt to get food, supplies, and weapons to strengthen their attacks on Israel. However, this column by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal goes into much more depth than I've explained here. What I took from it is that Egypt and the rest of the Middle Eastern countries have much more to fear from it. If you have any interest in this stuff, I would recommend reading it.