Three Ways to War in Gaza
Who'll fight--and who'll manage to stay out?
BY BRET STEPHENS
Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Wonder where and when the next Middle East war is going to take place? The likeliest answer is the Gaza Strip, perhaps before the year is out. Who will fight it? Now there is an interesting question.
Three sets of circumstances are operating simultaneously in this tiny patch of Palestinian land--not quite the size of Andorra but 20 times as populous--each of which has the potential to produce a different kind of violent outcome. First circumstance: the escalating factional fighting, verging on civil war, between Hamas forces loyal to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Fatah forces associated, albeit sometimes loosely, with President Mahmoud Abbas.
On Friday, relatives of a Fatah man recently killed by Hamas opened fire on Mr. Haniyeh's convoy in Gaza; Fatah militiamen have also threatened to assassinate the entire Hamas cabinet. Hamas, for its part, recently assassinated top Fatah militiaman Mohammed Shahadeh and intelligence officer Jad Tayah. Earlier this month, Hamas security forces opened fire on Fatah-affiliated policemen who had raided the Gaza branch of the Bank of Palestine in protest of their unpaid salaries. At least 10 people died; Fatah's Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda newspaper called Hamas's actions "Sedition" in banner headlines. Mr. Abbas is considering dissolving the government and moving to new elections; Hamas Interior Minister Said Siam deems the idea a "coup."
For some time, Israeli policy makers have been looking at the domestic Palestinian situation with a sense of satisfaction--somewhat akin to the American view of the mutual slaughter of Iraqis and Iranians during the 1980s. But that was before the June kidnapping of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit transformed Gaza's domestic crisis into an Israeli one. It was also before the summer's war with Hezbollah, which alerted Israelis that their borders were less secure than previously thought. Hence the second circumstance: the consolidation of Gaza, following Israel's full withdrawal in August 2005, into a terrorist fortress.
Last week, Egyptian police in the Sinai intercepted a shipment of 200 crates of guns and ammunition headed for the town of Rafah, which straddles the seven-mile Egyptian-Palestinian border. Also last week, the Israeli army (IDF) discovered 13 smuggling tunnels running under the border in addition to the 12 discovered since June. Israeli intelligence estimates that in the past year at least 19 tons of explosives have been smuggled through these tunnels into Gaza, plus some 15,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 1,000 RPGs, and quantities of Katyusha rockets, Strella antiaircraft missiles and Russian-made Kornet and Metis antitank missiles.
All this is in addition to an indigenous Gazan military industry that produced the hundreds of short-range Kassam rockets that have rained continuously on southern Israel for two years. And it explains why Israeli military planners feel they need to deal Gaza a punishing blow sooner rather than later, when the Palestinians might be in a position to bloody Israel the way Hezbollah did last summer. "We are going to make a massive ground operation in Gaza," warns Yuval Steinitz, until recently chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, in a recent interview. Underlying the remark is the sense that the IDF will not allow itself to be surprised again by events, much less humiliated twice by ostensibly weaker foes.
Mr. Steinitz points an accusing finger at Egypt, which agreed last year to step up its efforts to stop the weapons smuggling in exchange for Israel abandoning its aggressive border patrols along the so-called Philadelphi Corridor. "The Egyptians are violating and betraying all the agreements," he says. "They are doing to us what Syria is doing to the U.S. in Iraq. . . . Their real policy is to let Israelis and Palestinians bleed together."
Talk to the Egyptians, however, and you get a different story. In public, the Egyptians generally neither acknowledge nor deny that they are letting the smuggling happen: Acknowledgment risks alienating the U.S. while denial risks enraging their own public opinion. In private, however, Egyptians admit that they condone and perhaps even participate in the smuggling, but only to arm and strengthen Fatah. The arms to Hamas are being shipped, supposedly against Egypt's wishes, from Iran via Syria and Hezbollah.
Here, then, is the third circumstance: The rise of Hamas, with ties to Iran and potentially a secure territorial base of its own, is an even greater long-term threat to the brittle regime of Hosni Mubarak than it is to Israel.
Consider the Kabuki dance being played around the fate of Cpl. Shalit. The Egyptians have been negotiating his release for months, probably in good faith: They fear that indefinite detention might lead to a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza, which would have spillover effects in the Sinai. At the same time, Mr. Mubarak has been ratcheting up the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's sister organization in Egypt, by canceling elections the Brotherhood seemed likely to win and tinkering with the election law to further shut it out of the political process. Poor 19-year-old Cpl. Shalit is being played by Hamas as a card in two separate games: with the Israelis for the release of Palestinian prisoners and with the Egyptians for political concessions in Cairo.
The political heat between the two sides was noticeably raised last week when Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar reportedly warned Egypt that if it failed to open its border with Gaza "there will be no border." Equally extraordinary was that the statement was widely reprinted in the Egyptian state media, playing into the broad suspicion that the Brotherhood, as a religious organization, is fundamentally anti-Egypt in the national sense. "Now the line is, 'No more foreign ministry,'" says an Egyptian source, suggesting the Mubarak regime is quickly moving away from diplomacy to more aggressive forms of persuasion with Hamas.
If Egypt or Israel had the luxury of choice they would abandon Gaza to its own miserable devices, or--even better--to each other. But that's not how it works in the Middle East. The war for Gaza is coming, no matter who does the fighting. Whoever stays out of it wins.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays
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