Gaza Travel Guide

Published at the Mere Rhetoric blog...

Dear Crazy People,

We've been given to understand that you intend to stage another media stunt, wherein you're again going to float some empty ships – they may be full this time, they were mostly empty last time – in the general direction of the Gaza Strip. Your hope is apparently that your cameramen will capture the Israeli reaction and edit it into an overreaction or, failing that, simply reprint your feverish fantasies with slack-jawed credulity. Again.

Our problem isn't so much that your goal involves obfuscating the millions of tons of food and aid we've delivered to Gaza civilians, which allowed Hamas to move money away from infrastructure and into weaponry, which led to more of our cities getting bombarded with rockets and missiles. It's not even how, knowing that we deliver 15,000 tons of goods every week, your 10,000 tons of concrete isn't exactly a shining testament to your good intentions. Not when just last week we handed over 810,209 liters of heavy duty diesel fuel, 21 truckloads of milk powder and baby food, 897 tons of cooking gas, 66 truckloads of fruits and vegetables, 51 truckloads of wheat, 27 truckloads of meat, chicken and fish products, 40 truckloads of dairy products, 117 truckloads of animal feed, 36 truckloads of hygiene products, 38 trucks of clothing, 22 trucks of sugar and 4 trucks of medicine and medical equipment. But again: not the issue.

Really what we're concerned about is that you suck at driving boats. Last time you only had one ship and you still managed to crash it because – of all things – you tried to outmaneuver an Israeli Navy vessel. This time you're bringing nine boats. While we fully expect our Navy to interdict all of you, a legal and justified act under black letter maritime law, the odds are overwhelming that one of you tools is going to accidentally ground your boat. Given your obvious intention of creating a spectacle and your similarly obvious inability to manage same, it's pretty much inevitable.

If and when that happens, we'd like you to have at least some sense of how to survive in Gaza City. The alternative is you running across the border – complaining the whole time about our security checkpoints – and that would be awkward for everyone.

So we've put together this Gaza Tourism Guide, complete with picture galleries, which we believe to be the most comprehensive ever assembled on the web.