Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach

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fter two Parries giddy over the breached Gaza-Egyptian border, this third returns to giddiness after considering the dangers.

First, the unlikely ones. According to BBC reports half the Gaza population crossed — some 750,000 people. The deed now done, the memory and knowledge now exists: a human wave, aided by the governing party, can spill out. If it can to the southwest, why not to the northeast? Could the crowds of Gaza be whipped up into enough of an excitement to similarly storm the border with Israel? While the Egyptian soldiers behaved passively in face of the encroachment, Israeli soldiers obviously could not. The stampede would have to be impeded, which would require riot control and form unpleasant television footage. But realistically I just can’t imagine this happening; the enthusiasm just isn’t there — which shows the true priorities and orientation of the Gazan people. Rather than conflict with Israel, what they seek in the immediate, short and medium terms is commerce with Egypt.

Another danger is that Israel will bow to international demands — if indeed there are any — and resume supplying basic services at previous levels, diluting the paradigm-changing potency of the past few days. This seems unlikely however if disengagement from Gaza and its hoped-for consequences — i.e., what we are seeing now, Gaza’s rapprochement with Egypt — is, as your author believes, the unspoken raison d’etre of the Kadima party and this government.

The one danger that does seem quite likely though is that Hamas will use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, seeking to operate in areas of the Sinai the way Hezballah does in southern Lebanon. As well as the tactical benefit of having a larger area is the strategic boon of fomenting discord between Egypt and Israel. Whereas Lebanon is considered too weak to curtail Hezballah and for it the expectations governing sovereign states are subsequently somewhat lifted, Egypt would be expected to police its own territory, with the presumption that if it does not and allows attacks on Israel to emanate from its soil then it tacitly approves of them.

It’s difficult to wager which way this will go. Yes, Egypt is notorious for harshness towards its own religious revolutionaries, the Muslim Brotherhood, but it also accommodates them with certain mutual understandings. And most Westerners know the broad outlines of the approach across the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia: enable violent fanatics to attack someone else instead. Hamas, clearly ready to rumble, will test Egypt on this. If Egypt does not crack down, some level of Egyptian-Israeli discord seems an almost inevitable result of disengagement — indeed, so much so that Israel must have accepted it as a manageable cost of the larger mission to divert diplomatic momentum away from the current untenable two-state solution.

But even as Egypt’s attitude towards Hamas could go either way, what seems certain — and quite sad — is Hamas’s attitude towards the people it governs. No liberal democratic free marketeers these. Soon enough, and at a time of their choosing rather than Egypt’s, the border will be tightened. Hamas wants control over it not to enable the citizenry to cross at will, but to influence who and what crosses when. Those Gazans who have wandered into Egypt without papers will return home, and once there will be kept imprisoned by their own elected government. Yet it seems to me that Hamas has set in motion a movement more powerful than itself that will in time replace it. The longings of the Gazan people themselves have now been refocused onto a single achievable and just goal: not political union with the West Bank, though that will come in time to some degree; nor the destruction of Israel, which will long outlast all the political entities around it; but simply freedom of access to the cities, coasts, deserts and riverbanks of giant neighboring Egypt. Hamas won’t give them that. Eventually Gazans will find and install people who will.

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