The Tundra Tabloids was recently in a meeting with an Israeli official who stated that in the forceable future, the only thing the Jewish state can do in its relations with the Palestinians, is to maintain the status quo, and wait for them to finally come to their senses, there is nothing else that can be done that hasn’t been tried already.
Israel isn’t alone in that regard, Egypt as well has come to the conclusion that contagion of the Fakestinian problem is the best remedy for the illness on their border with the divided city of Rafah. They are not kidding themselves, they too know that any strengthening of Hamas, the Fakestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will not bring stability to their border.
The only thing left is to tightly secure the border, something of which Obama refuses to do in the US on its own southern border with Mexico, but I digress, let me continue.
If anyone really wants to know what the situation actually is between Israel and the Arabs called the ‘Palestinians’, they only need to look at what their Arab neighbors are doing. Egypt builds walls to strengthen its own borders and security, while the Syrians use the situation to further Iranian self interests in the region. The Heznazis are being strengthened in Lebanon while the useful stooges in Scandinavia and elsewhere are being used as a means to help delitigimize the Jewish state in the international arena. That’s what is happening, and Barry Rubin is there to shed further light on it for us. KGS
By Barry Rubin
There is a bit of silver lining, even in the Gaza cloud. It’s this: the Egyptian government, aware that the West won’t help it get rid of the revolutionary Islamist regime there, that Israel cannot do it, and that Hamas won’t voluntarily accept subordination to the Palestinian Authority, now understands it has to protect itself from that threat.
For Egypt, the threat is multiple. Most directly, Hamas is a close ally to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a group that wants to overturn the nationalist regime and give Egypt an Islamist state that would enjoy all the blessings of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan. In or after their revolution, the Egyptian elite would be murdered and all of its property confiscated.
A second threat to Egypt comes from the fact that Hamas is an Iranian client. The days are long gone when Egypt could credibly present itself as the leader of the Arab world and the trend-setter for the region, but it still has a real national interest in what happens elsewhere in the area.
Iran is a threat to Egypt in four ways: Persian versus Arab; Shia versus Sunni; Islamist versus nationalist; and Iran versus Egypt on a state-to-state level of competition. One might well think of a hostile Gaza Strip in relation to Egypt as parallel to what a Communist Cuba has been to the United States.
On a third level, Gaza could easily become a safe haven for terrorists operating against Egypt. Any weapon smuggled into Gaza, for example, could reappear some day in an attack on tourists in Cairo.
With Egypt approaching its first “normal” transition of leadership in forty years the government seems to be all the more nervous about such things.
