Recent developments on Israel's southern borders
have illustrated the direct relationship between the changes
sweeping Arab lands and mounting threats to Israel's national
security.
This past weekend, as Egyptians went to the polls,
terrorists operating in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula fired two Grad
rockets into southern Israel.
The projectiles landed in Uvda and Mitzpe Ramon,
which are located north of the Red Sea tourist hub of Eilat. These
are areas that had never seen terrorist rocket fire before.
Mitzpe Ramon is situated 14 kilometers north of the
Egyptian border. According to Israel Police bomb squad officials,
the rockets used in the attack have a maximum range of 22
kilometers, and Israeli security forces say that Sinai is filled
with secret weapons caches containing many more rockets, RPGs,
machine guns, and anti-tank missiles, as well as terror cells from
Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al Qaeda-affiliated groups ready to use
them.
Soon after the double rocket attack, some of those
deadly weapons were put to use again on Sunday, when a four-man
terror cell from Sinai attacked a Ministry of Defense construction
crew working on a fence being built by Israel on its border with
Egypt.
Armed with RPGs and machine guns, the cell, which
likely originated in Gaza and may have been sent by Islamic Jihad,
infiltrated Israel in an area where the fence has not yet been
completed, and ambushed two vehicles containing fence construction
crews, killing a 36-year-old Israeli Arab father of four from
Haifa.
IDF ground units swiftly arrived, engaging and
killing two of the gunmen who entered Israel. Two other attackers
who remained on the Egyptian side of the border retreated into the
Sinai desert.
Hours later on Sunday, the Israel Air Force carried
out a strike against an Islamic Jihad sniper team in northern Gaza
which had been attempting to murder Israeli farmers in recent weeks
working their land just across the fence. Islamic Jihad responded
by shooting a rocket at a rural district in southern Israel. Once
again, the Iranian-backed terror organization was busy instigating
attacks on civilian targets in Israel, despite Hamas's pretense of
having a monopoly of power in Gaza.
Several conclusions can be drawn from this latest
escalation. The first is that the Egyptian military and its
political echelon, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF),
is continuing to lose its grip on the Sinai Peninsula. At this
stage, SCAF is most concerned about losing Cairo and the political
institutions of power to the Islamists, and is engaged in a fateful
power struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood for control of Egypt,
the Arab world's most influential country.
Signs of this struggle include the decision by
Egypt's constitutional court to dissolve the lower house of
parliament, which had come under the firm control of the Islamists,
and SCAF's bold announcement in recent days that it was retaking
key political powers back from the Islamist parliament.
It is not difficult to guess
who Hamas is rooting for in this internal Egyptian battle. On
Monday evening, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh congratulated
the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi for his victory over his
secular rival, saying he was praying for a strong Egypt that would
"restrain" Israel. Hamas supporters danced in Gaza's
streets and handed out sweets to celebrate the apparent victory of
their fellow Islamists.
Hamas, having lost its base in the unraveling Syrian
state, has high hopes for a new Egypt under Islamist control, where
it could set up a solid base, and receive cooperation on arms
smuggling through tunnels linking Gaza to Sinai.
A future Hamas-Egypt alliance
has the potential to be a relationship based on a shared ideology
and common worldview; the opposite of the antagonistic relationship
between Hamas and the old Mubarak regime, which was openly hostile
to Palestinian Islamists. This
future alliance could be much deeper than a mere marriage of
convenience.
The second conclusion is that it is no longer
possible to separate the Hamas regime in Gaza - a hornet's nest of
jihadi organizations - from neighboring Sinai. Sinai itself cannot
be separated from the power struggles in Cairo. The result is an
explosive geopolitical triangle, made up of Egypt and Gaza, and the
threats emanating from them to southern Israel.
To illustrate this link, one need look no further
than the timing of the firing of the rockets, which coincided
precisely with presidential elections in Egypt.
While it remains unclear who exactly was behind the
attacks, some security officials suspect that Hamas's dangerous and
skilled head of operations, Ra'ad Atar, was involved.
Haaretz ran a report citing security officials as saying that the
rockets were fired by Hamas at
the request of the Muslim Brotherhood, to help gain
votes on elections day.
If true, that would represent an unprecedented level
of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood involvement in Sinai and Gaza-based
terrorism against Israel.
But that claim was later denied by members of
Israel's security establishment, leaving open the mystery of who
fired the rockets, and at whose orders.
If this is the state of affairs before the Muslim
Brotherhood takes over Egypt, how will things appear under an
Islamist Egypt?
One voice within Egypt provided a glimpse into what
could lay ahead.
In April, an Egyptian philosopher and analyst named
Murad Wahba gave a remarkable interview to a prominent local television channel, translated
to English by the Middle East Media Research Institute. In it, he
provided viewers with an unflinching view of Egypt's future under
the Muslim Brotherhood.
Wahba made a number of predictions in the interview
which are well worth listening to, since his appraisal is not
hindered by wishful thinking or diplomatic constraints.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is, of course,
exploiting the issue of Israel, and is trying to generate threats
from Sinai, in an attempt to drag the Egyptian army into starting
another war with Israel. But I think that the military leadership
is aware of what is happening in the Sinai, and of the goals
underlying these incidents. Therefore, in my view, there will be a
crisis between the leadership of the Egyptian army and the Muslim
Brotherhood," he said.
"For the Egyptian military leadership, the
notion of war pertains to national security: our army's mission is
to defend us against an attacking enemy, but it is not part of its
mission to artificially initiate a war. For the Muslim Brotherhood, war is something one
initiates, in an effort to convert the region and the entire world
to Islam. Therefore, the Muslim Brotherhood is ideologically
required to start wars," he added.
Wahba was then asked about the Brotherhood's
apparent commitment to the Egypt-Israel peace accord - cited by
many in the West as proof of the organization's moderation and
rationality.
"I always pay attention to the expressions they
use when they talk about their commitment to the international
agreements," he answered. "They always add the qualifier:
'But it's subject to change and to discussion.' That is their
tactic. I've noticed that they always conclude with a 'but' - 'we
honor the international agreements, but the people will have its
say.' 'If circumstances change, it may become necessary to
reexamine [the treaty].' It is these expressions that will enable
them to send the Egyptian army to initiate war against Israel in
the future," Wahba said.
Today, the Egyptian army is a secular, potent
political force that supports regional stability. But Wahba was
peering into the future, to a time when the Muslim Brotherhood
might succeed in its task of banishing the army from the political
scene.
"If the army returns to the military bases, and
the Muslim Brotherhood takes over the state institutions, it will
mean the Islamization of the country and of society. When that
happens, the army, which is a state institution,will undergo
Islamization willy-nilly," Wahba said.
Whether the Muslim Brotherhood had a direct hand in
the recent rocket attacks or not, its gradual ascendency to power
and the weakening of the Egyptian military will require significant
redeployment of Israeli security forces along the southern border.
For now, terrorists intent on using the Sinai to
launch attacks know that Israel is enormously reluctant to even
weigh the idea of engaging threats on Egyptian territory in Sinai,
meaning that Israel can only respond defensively to these types of
attacks.
But if the Egyptian military is unable to retake
control of Sinai, and if Israel is faced with more serious and
deadly potential future atrocities that are planned and executed
south of the border, Jerusalem may need to begin weighing pinpoint
counter-terrorism operations in Sinai to protect its civilians.
That development would undoubtedly raise the stakes
in the region.
Yaakov Lappin, JINSA Visiting Fellow,
is a journalist for the Jerusalem Post, where he covers police
and national security affairs. For more information on the JINSA
Visiting Fellows program, click here.
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