J Post editorial - Egypt's 9/11
THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 10, 2004
Let us take a short pause from the geostrategic analyses swirling around the horrific terror attacks in the Sinai to consider this: Egyptians and Israelis continue to work side by side in the rubble to save lives and recover bodies, and the same two peoples are burying their dead.
Our two nations share something else: We have become simultaneous victims of the latest 9/11.
It will take some time to sort out the inevitable, but quite possibly deadly, snafus that hampered rescue efforts in the first hours after the attacks. It is heartbreaking to think of the Israeli ambulances blocked at the border, just a few hundred meters away from the stricken Taba Hilton, waiting for bureaucratic obstacles to be removed as critical minutes and hours slipped away.
For the record, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra have thanked Egypt rather effusively for its cooperation. It is no small matter to stream rescue teams over an international border, even in an emergency. Yet these attacks require that our two nations improve security and logistical cooperation - as Israel has been suggesting for some time - with an eye to both prevention and treatment of such concerns in the future.
In this context, it is important to recognize what this coordinated, evidently long-planned, series of attacks was and was not. It was not an example of how, as Yasser Arafat's media adviser Nabil Abu Rudeineh claimed, "the continuation of Israel's occupation and aggressions against the Palestinian people [that] fuel the world's anger." Nice try.
The Palestinians did not even try to explain the original 9/11 in such a fashion. Nor did they "draft" the attack on Australian tourists in Bali, or even the synagogues in Istanbul. Indeed, this most recent attack has most in common with these last two: like in Bali, it targeted nationals of one country vacationing in another; like in Istanbul, Jews were used as a cover to "legitimize" an attack by the jihadis inside a Muslim country.
Security sources are saying that the attacks most likely were planned long before the recent Israeli operations in Gaza. Though the Palestinian street has been expressing glee and satisfaction, Palestinian leaders, including Arafat, have rushed to deny responsibility and express their condolences - to Egypt and not to Israel.
For Israel, these attacks would have been our 9/11 - our own branch of the global jihad - if we had not been experiencing the equivalent of dozens of 9/11s drawn out over the past four years. Egypt will be making a great mistake if pretends, as some spokesmen already have, that the attacks are a natural outgrowth of hatred of Israelis.
When two synagogues were attacked in Istanbul, Turkish leaders made it immediately clear that it was an attack against their sovereignty and nation. Egyptians seem to be torn between taking the Palestinian tack of blaming Israel and the US, or blaming al-Qaida or affiliated jihadis.
This dilemma should illustrate the artificiality of trying to separate the two conflicts, as the Arab world and, until now, Palestinians have tried to do. The Arab world has argued that terrorism against Israel is not only outside the global jihad, but is not terrorism at all. Rather, it claims, this is "resistance against occupation." The Palestinians have subscribed to this, yet now they are trying to rope in the entire jihad against the West. As Abu Rudeineh puts it, "We hope that Israel will learn a lesson and that the US will understand that... without the creation of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, there will be no end to violence."
Abu Rudeineh is right to link what are usually understood as two conflicts, but he has it backward: The jihad against the West would be fueled, not slaked, by sacrificing Israel to its flames. By the same token, convincing the Arab world, including the Palestinians, of the futility of the jihad against Israel will go a long way toward defeating the jihad against the West.
Egypt had followed the Arab pattern of fighting and appeasing the global jihad, which arguably was incubated most of a century ago on its own soil, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. That pattern has only changed marginally since 9/11. The refusal to really lend a shoulder to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict is a major pillar of the Arab appeasement of the jihadis. The attacks in Sinai, like those in Riyadh and Casablanca, demonstrate that no amount of throwing Israel to the dogs will save the Arab world itself from the Islamist threat.
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