Palestinian children gaze over a portion of the destroyed border fence in Rafah that formerly separated the Gaza Strip from Egypt. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

Who said history doesn't repeat itself? Well, sort of. In the Biblical battle of Jericho it was trumpets that pulled down the walls.

In modern day Gaza it was explosives and a bulldozer that pulled down part of the seven-mile barrier erected by Israel to keep Gazans confined and to prevent weapons and munitions from entering the Strip.

With his recently found interest in the Middle East U.S. President George W. Bush may have watched some of the news footage beamed into the White House from the Egyptian-Gaza border.

The president would have watched, perhaps with a sense of horror, maybe with a hint of remorse, as about 60,000 Palestinians oozed over the border into Egypt on Wednesday in search of food and other basic goods.

What Bush would have seen is what happens when a territory of 1.5 million people - make that 1.5 million desperate people, who are treated to daily doses of humiliation, threatened with starvation and severed from the rest of the world, and forced to live in what basically amounts to the world's largest prison - are finally pushed to the limits.

The result, as the American president would have seen, is that when it comes to hunger it matters little how tall the walls are, how wide or electrified the fences are; hunger recognizes no borders.

The problem of hunger is not exclusively limited to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Hungry people are likely to

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revolt anywhere in the world. As the former governor of a state bordering Mexico, President Bush is not unacquainted with poverty - albeit from afar.

Watching the images of human waves swarm across the border at Rafah, undeterred by man-made obstacles such as politics and frontiers, brought to memory the gripping and almost-prophetic novel, "The Camp of the Saints," by French author Jean Raspail.

Written about 35 years ago, Raspail's novel warns what may happen when millions of starving economic refugees from the Indian subcontinent commandeer an armada of ships and storm the beaches of southern Europe in search of food.

Propelled by poverty and deteriorating social conditions, tens of millions of hungry people trample across borders, not unlike what happened Wednesday on the Gazan-Egyptian border. The difference between Raspail's novel and the events of Wednesday is that the Palestinians paid for their purchases in Egypt.

As in Raspail's book, faced with a hunger, people will topple walls, trample over borders and ignore man-made frontiers.

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