But many Arabs are rooting against Hamas
martedì 30 dicembre 2008 English 0 commenti
Il Giornale, 29 December 2008The most significant images of the war underway yesterday are seen on the border between Gaza and Egypt with all the Arabesque plotting that the Middle East is able of composing. The Egyptian soldiers watch the border with grasped rifles from Rafiah along Tzir Philadephi; from the hours of the late morning unwinds the siege of the Palestinians who want to pass there beyond the border while the soldiers from the other part have ordered to hinder any fundamentalist tide of penetrating into the country of Mubarak, the moderate. Further along, there is the paradoxical scene of trucks full of humanitarian aid and ambulances, which the Palestinians won’t let pass as they yell at the Egyptians: “Let us enter alive instead of dealing with the dead”.
Around five in the afternoon, while the sun sets on the Mediterranean Sea, F16s enter the scene fast and in four minutes destroy 40 tunnels under the border. It seems that they are the most important among the 600 dug for transporting inside Gaza goods of all kinds from Egypt, those that have filled Gaza with missiles. But yesterday the missiles, against all forecasts, did not rain from Gaza and the population of the south of Israel has passed a relatively tranquil day: sign that the targets hit by the IAF have been chosen with a clear intelligence operation and that the structures of Hamas find it hard to recover from an operation compared here in Israel to that of 1967, which hit Egyptian Mig-21s to the ground.
The Israeli military maintains that it has hit 50 percent of Hamas’s war resources, missiles, stored dynamite, etc. And Hamas prefers now to play the role of the victim, continues to point out, at least for a bit, that Israel continues to react in a “disproportionate” manner. But it is the Arab world, first and foremost, to be contradictory in front of Hamas’s victimization, and overall Egypt and the same Palestinian brothers guided by Abu Mazen: he has said from Cairo that he warned Hamas that its actions would bring an attack by Israel. Well, he has to take some of the responsibility, thus adding accusations for the dozens of Fatah militiamen who are Hamas’s prisoners who were killed in the prisons bombed by the Israeli: the massacre could have been avoided if they had been liberated beforehand. Also, the Egyptians have moved with ambiguity between demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinians and disapproval towards Hamas’s incomprehensible politics, which has brought its population to the present situation. From Sana in Yemen, to many cities and Middle Eastern villages, including those of the West Bank and East Jerusalem itself, to Tehran, where Khamenei has asked all Muslims to fight for Gaza “in all ways possible,” to Beirut where the protests called by Hezbollah yell slogans in which Mubarak’s name rhymes with Ehud Barak, to Amman where the Muslim Brothers have paraded with angry slogans, to Damascus where Mashaal calls for a military Intifada of the entire Arab world, has shown the usual anti-Israel rage, but this time it has also sparked anti-Egyptian and anti Fatah sentiments. Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, has spoken with the same old tones of hatred, urging his men to be ready to defend themselves. But, cunningly, without inviting them to attack the Zionist monster.
It is the first time that moderates find themselves crushed in their reality, that they cannot wave the same flag of hatred against Israel. Hamas has immobilized them. And it is logical given the vertical rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East. We have already written of a secret “moderate” Arab request to Israel of putting an end to it with Hamas, which is seen as Iran’s incendiary emissary, determined to destroy all equilibrium in the Middle East. Egypt, that has long attempted a truce between Fatah and Hamas, was furious beyond measure after that Hamas deserted the meeting of November in Cairo, surely by Iran’s request. In the meantime, Hamas searches for new shores: from Gaza City, Ismail Haniyeh has incessantly made many calls to Hamas’s leadership in Damascus, as well as to the King of Bahrain and to the rulers of Qatar. But Hamas can remain greatly harmed by the rupture with Egypt: there are in the works important economic agreements that seem very far from the snarling current reality. For sure now, after the facts of Gaza, the entire Arab world must come to terms with the new demonstrations of Israeli military deterrence, which after its war with Hezbollah in 2006 and because of the strategy of waiting chosen by the Israeli leadership, seemed to have greatly diminished. Now all neighbors, including Iran, know that the Israeli military is that of a time when it decides that - as Tzipi Livni said - “enough is enough.”