Buried in the international newspapers last week was a jaw-dropping warning made by the Egyptian Foreign Minister to the masses of Gaza Palestinians poised to make yet another break out into Egypt. He cautioned them that “anyone who tried to break through the Egyptian border would have his legs broken." Huh!? What’s that all about? It doesn’t make sense. Israelis are the ones that are supposed to want to break Palestinian bones, not fellow Arabs. And where is the international outrage? If the Israeli foreign minister had said that, or had Condoleezza Rice suggested that course of action, then there would have been a deafening international outcry. No outcry: Arab on Arab violence does not sell newspapers, and moreover, it’s too confusing a story: warnings like this do not fit the usual cartoon-like simplifications that most of us have come to expect from the media. Let’s take a look at what this means, and try to understand its real significance.

To begin with, the Egyptians are afraid of the Palestinians these days, particularly those in Gaza. To understand why, it’s necessary to go back some 80 years, when Egyptian nationalism was stirring as the yoke of British imperialism was being thrown off. It was also the time when the Turkish Caliphate finally dissolved, and there were forces at play whose goal was to re-establish the dominance of Islamic rule. In Egypt those forces were channeled into the Muslim Brotherhood by its founder, Hassan al-Banna. For 80 years, the Muslim Brotherhood has stayed “on-message”, wanting to replace secular and pluralistic forms of government with ancient Sharia rule. And for 80 years, the Egyptians have been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood and their goals. So while many of us see the Egyptians in a bad light - as a country ruled by a dictator that suppresses democracy - we forget who’s waiting in the wings to take over when they can, the Muslim Brotherhood. While we’re all for spreading democracy and fighting radical Islam, sometimes it’s hard to do both simultaneously. Nowhere is that harder to do than in Egypt.

So what’s this got to do with the Palestinians? Simple. Article 2 of the Hamas Covenant states quite clearly that “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine”. The Egyptians fear an open border with Gaza: they do not want a backflow of the most militant members of the Muslim Brotherhood into their country. Few remember that in 1979 Egypt refused an Israeli offer to hand over the Gaza Strip as part of the peace deal. In short, they fear their fellow Arabs much more than they fear their Jewish neighbors. For Egypt, hammering the Muslim Brotherhood trumps helping the Palestinian “victims of Israeli brutality”. It’s that simple.

While the Egyptians find themselves in a real bind, others see it as an opportunity. Chief among those is Iran, who can now see a cause and effect relationship between supporting the Palestinian cause and spreading their 1979 Islamic revolution to Egypt. To the Iranians, killing Israelis with Iranian technology now has the added benefit of undermining Egyptian society. But surprisingly, some in Israel also see this as an opportunity. The more Qassams that land, the more tempted the Israelis are to seal off the border with Gaza for good – no food, no electricity, no trade. This will pressure the Egyptians to tear down the Egypt-Gaza border once and for all, and create a defacto union between Egypt and Gaza. That raises the ante: the Israelis know that the Egyptians can deal with Hamas much more effectively than they can, while the Iranians and Hamasniks would hope that a “reverse takeover” of Egypt would be in the cards. Time will tell who will win this high stakes poker game.

Does all this have bearing on us here in Houston? Absolutely, to those optimists among us that are forever looking for common ground with our Arab cousins. Events playing out on the Gaza/Egyptian border these days emphasize the common enemy that we all face, namely the forces of radical Islam that are working to kill embryonic democracies and replace democratic reform with repressive Sharia rule. No one really wants to break Palestinian legs, but those legs have been hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood, kissing cousins to Al Qaeda. We’re all in it together.

 

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