Gideon Levy On Nakba Day, Gazans Faced a Choice: To Mourn Their Dead, or Go Out and Protest .
On Nakba Day, Gazans faced a choice: To mourn their dead ... - Haaretz On Tuesday, the tires burned on both sides of the fence that imprisons the residents of the Gaza Strip. Thick black columns of smoke rose into the air a few hundred meters apart, dispersing with the shifting winds, blackening the skies of the Strip and of what’s called the Gaza “envelope” – the Israeli communities along the border – blotting out the landscape. Fires raged in the fields of Philistia, on both sides of the border fence. In both cases, it was Palestinians who lit them. On their side they burned tires, elevating their protest skyward in the form of dense smoke. Toward the Israeli side they sent their burning “fox tails,” the fire kites, no less primitive than the fire started by Samson in the Bible story (in Judges 15). One of the kites set a field ablaze and also ignited a few terrifyingly large truck tires which for some reason were stac