Last week Noah Pollak and I suggested that the Gaza blockade, coupled with the breaching of the Gaza-Egypt border, was good news, since it signalled a major shift of responsibility for Gaza, from Israel to Egypt. Although Eric Trager didn’t much agree, things are looking increasingly like Noah and I are right. Although the Egyptians have been trying to avoid taking responsibility for Gaza, it turns out that Hamas has plans of its own. According to reports, too see Gaza severing all economic ties with Israel as a high priority — a rare point of accord between Israel and Hamas. “Since the day we were elected,” said Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s de facto ruler, “we have said that we want to progress toward breaking our economic ties with Israel.” He added that “Egypt is in a much better position [than Israel] to meet the needs of the Gaza Strip.”
Not surprisingly, folks in Ramallah are furious at the prospect of Israel conducting a separete foreign policy with Hamas, thereby creating two separate Palestinian non-states. And Egyptians are anything but thrilled at deepened ties between Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood types in Egypt. But after so many years of telling their own people that the plight of the Palestinians is the root of all evil, the Egyptian government will be hard-pressed to reject the Palestinians’ own plea for salvation.
This is complicated, and may not work, but it’s worth taking the experiment to its conclusion. The benefits of an internationally recognized separation between Israel and Gaza are as follows: (1) Israel is wrenched free of an intolerable situation in which it is forced to provide food, fuel, and electricity to a terror organization currently involved in killing Israeli citizens; (2) Israelis will no longer be an “occupier” in Gaza, and will have a r elative free hand militarily; (3) Egypt will have to answer, to some degree or another, for Hamas’ iniquities. Not a bad deal overall.
Yet we should not be popping corks. Perhaps this is the best way that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza could have ended. But in the big picture, what has happened over the last three years is that the Gaza Strip has shifted from being under Western rule to a full-fledged Iranian satellite. (Last week, Iran sent officials to Egypt to discuss their “help” with Gaza. Why is an American ally receiving delegations from Ahmedinajad?) To use Soviet-era language, this is the opposite of “containment.” There is nothing good, not for Israel and not for the US, about the rise of an Iranian client state in the thick of the Western middle East.
Hamas built its popularity not only on by fanning the flames of revolution, but also on the promise of more caring, less corrupt governance than what Arafat had offered. Let us hope that at some point, some kind of accountability kicks in, and that perhaps with the ameliorating influence of pro-Western Egypt, Hamas will one day find a way to drop all this terror stuff and try to build their Gaza on a positive Islamic vision. Not too likely–but we can dream, can’t we? All right, never mind.
