***UPDATE***
Today, the morning after Der Tag with Mubarak finally stepping down and jubiliation abroad, I finally saw an MSM reference to the Gaza frontier (By IAN DEITCH, Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City contributed reporting. Associated Press, 2010, February 11. From news.yahoo.com.)
Expectations were rising in Gaza that regime change in Egypt will help end a crushing border blockade of the territory, imposed by Egypt and Israel after a violent Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007...
...Hamas has smuggled weapons into Gaza through smuggling tunnels that bypass the blockade, and Israel fears the influx of arms could now increase.
Let's hope Egypt keeps the peace.
***
Everyone seems to be soft-peddling a huge short-term issue to Israelis: the extreme unlikelihood that Egypt will choose to remain the Palestinian’s jailor, almost regardless of how the revolution turns out, unless the military is still pulling the strings.
Context Time:
Not very many years ago, Israel made one of its periodic military lunges into a neighbor, in the case in question, it was Lebanon. But the results were a global surprise. Hezbollah, armed with improved tactics and techniques for resistance, and with a some fairly light weapons such as Katyusha rockets*, inflicted an enormous PR black-eye on the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. Instead of fighting on discernable lines and being rolled over in hours, Hezbollah elected to hide in numerous small strong points, wait to shoot until the Israelis were unprepared, blend with the population and so on. All in all, it was a pretty well executed evolution of classic asymmetrical warfare strategies that date back to, well, the Old Testament, if not before. The IDF went home and various parties waited a few months to try and spin it as another victory for the pocket super-power.
Down at the other end of Israel (i.e. a mere 2 hours drive south) Hamas, the elected rulers of the Gaza Strip, sat up and took notice. Israelis of all stripes did too. The thought everyone thunk was this: what if Israel charged into the Gaza Strip and met that kind of resistance?
The Gaza Strip, of course, is already almost off-limits to the Israelis. A military operation to subdue it would be successful but horrific, in terms of IDF losses and in terms of civilian losses and in PR terms: cameras, cameras everywhere. Worse, re-conquest would bring the world closer to calling for "temporary" rights of Palestinians to vote in Israel and a "one-state" solution in which the Palestinians become a part of Israel. The part called "the majority of the voters".
But to keep Gaza quiet and un-armed, Israel needs Egypt to serve as jailor of the southern border of the Gaza Strip, where Gaza and Egypt meet, a stretch of border running a mere 10 kilometers. The main point of the present Israeli "angst" is that for quite a few years now, Egypt has in fact played the role of jailor on the southern frontier of Gaza. This cooperation with Israel has gone as far as allowing US soldiers with seismic equipment into Egyptian territory to hunt for the tunnels on behalf of the Israelis. A couple of years ago, when Egypt briefly allowed Palestinians to cross into a single small Egyptian town to buy basic supplies at scalper prices, it caused a global diplomatic crisis. This prison-guard function is desperately important to Israel. Keep the imagry inside the wire, keep the weaponry outside it.
Refresh to the present day:
Regardless of who takes power in Egypt away from the military regime, it seems unlikely that the rigor of the hunt for smugglers will remain as high after the revolution as it has been up until now. Rockets and AA guns and mines and other nasty toys will begin to get through, not to mention computers, telephones, metal-cutting machinery, concrete, medicine, and all the other things which help the Palestinians consolidate their nation either militarily and peacefully.
So Israel desperately needs Gaza to remain quiet and subdued and yet un-occupied by the IDF, things Hamas has so far been willing to provide in exchange for continuation of Hamas’ power in the strip. Hamas, like the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, is willing to be an un-admitted Israeli puppet if it means power over the ghetto.
The final piece to this puzzle is that the Palestinian people periodically get frustrated with their puppet governments and replace the old government with someone who offers to actually attempt to rescue them from their misery. (Possibly Egypt will be giving them that yearning sensation again, but that is far from the main point: after all, with or without Egyptian inspiration, the Palestinians will sooner or later replace Hamas with some fire-breathing radicals.**)
No, the main point is that Egypt has been closing off one of Gaza’s borders under the military regime. No matter who takes over after Mubarak, that already dangerously porous border is going to be getting even more porous.
El Baradei is an internationalist, someone who believes in international law as it evolved in the West. The problem is, Israel is seemingly in blatant contempt of international law in regard to the treatment of the Palestinians, not in one or two ways but in many ways. El Baradei is not likely to entirely lift the blockade / embargo of Gaza, but he isn’t likely to be very interested in keeping it as tight as it has been, either. Blabber about El Baradei covering up for Iran is just that, blabber. Israel doesn’t want an internationalist running Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood ditto: their charity work and their religious identification both conflict with Israel’s goal of long-term denial of decent living-conditions to independent-minded Palestinians. If catapulted to sole power, the Brotherhood would probably facially favor keeping the blockade in place, but they’d also be inclined to turn a blind eye to stepped-up smuggling. And what would they do if they were succeeded by, or evolved back into, genuine terrorists?
Truthfully, the old military dictatorship propping up Mubarak is the best bet for Israel to continue to maintain current living conditions and military disarmament in Gaza. Perhaps coincidentally, the US is now negotiating to get a new face atop the same old military power structure that has run Egypt since 1952.
Come meet the new boss! Guess who he’s the same as...
So when you read all the paranoia about the Egyptian Revolution, be aware that it is driven, to a great degree, by a single stretch of barb-wire a mere six miles long, and by the myopic question: who will guard that frontier?
_
* Technically speaking, there is no one particular model of rocket which is a Katyusha. A number of kinds of man-portable rockets of Soviet-genesis, or their descendants, are called Katyushas.
** A scary thought: the US is so out of touch that we regard Hamas as being the fire-breathing radicals. To think that is to pathetically underestimate the range and depth of human viewpoints.