Egyptian Complicity, Israeli Understanding

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that Gaza has devolved into a Hamastan since Israel withdrew from Gaza over a year ago. As the guys at Mideast On-Target assert in the attached article, Mideast: On Target - Egyptian Complicity, Israeli Understanding, the arms and money needed to accelerate this conflict have been pouring over (and under) the border from Egypt ever since the day Israel evacuated the Pliladelphia Strip between Gaza and Egypt at the end of the Summer of 2005, for a very specific reason: as an outlet of Egyptian extremism, lest such extremism backfire into Egypt and blow up the Egyptian regime. This would of course turn the most populous Arab state into an Islamist one (whose stability we have subsidized with government aid to the tune of several billion dollars per year since the late 70's)(See our posting on September 27th on the "Egyptian Volcano"). Condi Rice recently supposedly called the Egyptians on this issue during a recent visit there, but it continues. The "in for two days and out again" Israeli military incursions of the past several months to curb Hamas rocket attacks at Southern Israel have not had an impact, and according to the attached article, for the same cynical reasons. The stability of the Abbas presidency, and the ability to prevent civil war between Hamas and Fatah is dependent upon controlling this border and the tunnels beneath it, yet the Egyptians do nothing, and we do nothing. Where does the bill for this unvirtuous cycle get paid? Will the pressure relief valve of Gaza really prevent an ultimate Islamist takeover of Egypt?

It should be noted that there are reported negotations between the Israelis and Jordanians right now to permit a well- trained Jordanian brigade of Palestinian soldiers to enter the West Bank to shore up President Abbas in a potential coming conflict with Hamas (or to quash Hamas). All of these things are related.... Perhaps the best thing that can come out of this is for the Jordanian-assisted "moderate" Palestinians to engage and quash Hamas or, if stalemated, call for more Jordanian help in doing so, possibly leading to the old Jordanian confederation idea for the Palestinians that we have discussed here before, whereby the Palestinians achieve autonomy under the trusteeship of Jordan for a generation or so until they can emerge as a viable state (see my October 3rd posting, "Israelis Reach Out to Arab Nations..."). Some sort of generational resolution of the Palestinian conflict like this could put the Islamists back on their heels and begin to help turn the tide in the war on Islamist extremism. With the rise of the "Baker realists" about to occur in the Bush cabinet, Israel would be well advised to be pushing the Jordanian angle as the better of the alternatives that could be forced on it in 2007.