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MAIN POINTS
1 Egypt’s ability and willingness to end the smuggling into Gaza will decide the duration of the current campaign.
2 Hamas’s political and military posturing may have sealed the fate of its military wing.
3 Ehud Barak’s choice of military strategy in Gaza has left him politically both more popular and more exposed than ever.
4 Livni’s wholly inadequate grasp of military and political strategy has left her politically vulnerable as Kadima are squeezed from the political left and right.
5 Bibi Netanyahu’s political and military assessment has been vindicated and his political position appears insurmountable.
6 If Egypt cannot deliver Hamas eventually Israel may be forced into a three week operation of attrition-like fighting followed by several weeks of clearing out bunkers alongside manhunts of senior Hamas operatives and the dismantling of scores of various terror cells.
7 Despite this prospect at the moment Israel looks as though it will declare a unilateral ceasefire within days.
· ANALYSIS
· Egypt holds the key to the current conflict in Gaza. At the moment Egypt is both unwilling and unable to control the smuggling of arms and provisions into Gaza.
Egypt was never willing or able to control the smuggling for several reasons:
1. Allowing smuggling into Gaza has several benefits to Egypt –
a) It allows Egypt to have some control over Hamas. If Hamas displeases Egypt she can threaten to close or hamper the quantity and content of the smuggling. This allows Egypt a certain amount of leverage on Hamas, despite it being a crude and risky method of applying pressure.
b) It allows Egypt to maintain some leverage over Israel. If Israel displeases Egypt in some way, she can relax the control of smuggling into the Gaza Strip to increase the pressure on Israel to reverse any position Egypt feels runs counter to her interests. Egypt felt for a long period that the Qassam fire on Israel was a useful means to get Israel to make concessions in its talks over the West Bank but in particular in relation to Egypt’s demand that she be allowed to considerably increase her forces in the Sinai.
c) This year’s income from smuggling through the tunnels for Egyptian merchants, Hamas, local Gazan merchants, Egyptian border police, and the tunnel owners, is estimated by a Gazan research institute at $650 million. Before Hamas took power 18 months ago there were 20 tunnels currently there are between 500 to a 1,000. This income is particularly important to the Egyptian border police as they are poorly paid, work in harsh conditions, and face threats from Hamas and Bedouin gunmen who also bribe them to help ensure the smooth maintenance of the smuggling process.
The benefits to the Egyptian authorities of these bribes is that they do not need to find extra funding for their officers and men to ensure they remain in post, and they are a useful supplementary income for government officials. It also increases prosperity within the Sinai Peninsula thereby decreasing long-standing tensions between the regime and the local Bedouin population.
2. Egypt has always had difficulty patrolling and controlling smuggling into the Sinai Peninsula. There are over 320 miles of coastline to patrol and most of Hamas’s current missiles and funds have come from Sudan via traditional sea routes and are dropped off, sometimes quite openly, at various ports along the southern Sinai coast. They are mostly medium to long range Grad and Fajr missiles made in China and Iran respectively. The Bedouin have been increasingly pushed out of their traditional grazing lands as tourism has developed in the Peninsula and have resorted more and more to smuggling, which is in any case a traditional enterprise. Bribery of local officials has also been a useful source of income for the low paid non-Bedouin immigrant Egyptians as well and has meant there is little incentive to interfere in the process.
3. Egypt needs foreign help if it is to stop this trade but this in turn poses the regime difficult political problems. It raises difficult issues of sovereignty, competence, administration, and control. The reality is that, as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Egyptian government is not in control of its borders, corruption is rampant, and administration both incompetent and extremely bureaucratic. To admit help is needed exposes this reality to the world and therefore finding a solution to the smuggling of arms into the Sinai and onto Gaza, that does not expose the Egyptian regime to unwanted scrutiny, will be both complex, expensive, and time consuming.
4. Egypt considers the answer to most of these problems is a substantial increase in its forces into Sinai. Previous Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed in principle to allow a substantial increase in their forces from 750 to several thousand along the Gazan border but this was vetoed by the cabinet he headed because it was seen as an invitation to further increases in the future, and, in any case, most security advice was that if only the Egyptian border police performed their duties properly no increase would be needed. This failed to take into account the internal difficulties Egypt had in finding either the funds or the right calibre of men necessary to carry out a dangerous and uninviting job in one of the poorest and least developed parts of their country.
· The Israeli Cabinet agreed today that the operation in Gaza should continue. Ehud Barak’s strategy of a war of attrition in order to maintain low casualties has led him into an untenable position. He now has to rely totally on the Egyptians to extricate himself from the logic of his own strategy, which requires the IDF fight for weeks or months in order to bring about an end to rocket fire from Gaza. Simultaneously, each day that passes brings greater economic, diplomatic, and political pressures. If Barak cannot get the Egyptians to convince Hamas to stop the rocket fire he is faced with two unhappy alternatives: either the war continues for weeks in which case casualties will rise and his whole strategy will be seen to have failed, or, he fails to achieve an end to the rocket fire, and his strategy will have been proven utterly pointless.
· Tzipi Livni faces similar difficulties. She has learnt nothing from the Second Lebanon War. Livni only achieved UN Resolution 1701 as a result of PM Olmert ordering a final push in south Lebanon. This forced Hizb’allah to accept a ceasefire on Israel’s terms and allowed a greatly increased international force, as well as the Lebanese Army to move to its southern border for the first time in 40 years. Livni improbably claimed she could have achieved the same results within the first week of the war. Again, she has shown that her political goals cannot be achieved by the means she has proposed: a limited but harsh aerial bombardment of Gaza to be followed by a continuous response to each rocket fired. But Hamas are no more impressed by such tactics as Hizb’allah were at first in Lebanon. Only when defeat on the battlefield has become all but complete have Hizb’allah and every other Arab armed force Israel has ever faced in its history, been prepared to negotiate a cessation of violence.
Livni has appeared as something of an irrelevance, unable as she is to get anything substantial or worthwhile out of Egypt, and watching impotently as one by one her allies in Europe desert her. During hostilities Israel has only one ally of any significance: the United States. It remains to be seen whether Livni can keep even President Bush onside for the duration of this operation. This was Livni’s concern during the Second Lebanon War, that she would fail to keep EU and US support. PM Olmert kept his nerve and ordered the troops in on two separate occasions against her wishes. It requires a cool and tough mind to cope with such pressures and Israeli centre-right voters, upon which Kadima depend, have seen Livni does not have the mental strength or the strategic military or political vision to protect Israel’s vital interests at times of acute stress.
· This leaves Bibi Netanyahu of Likud in an unassailable position. His analysis of the disengagement from Gaza as a strategic blunder of the first magnitude will be seen to have been vindicated by much of the political centre and right that he needs to convince in order to gain power. And, his argument that a major military operation should have been carried out against Hamas in Gaza years ago, before it could entrench itself, will be seen as equally valid. Valid to such an extent that Defence Minister Ehud Barak has had to invent an extraordinarily tortuous strategy to safeguard IDF personnel’s lives despite the fact Israel’s very security continues to be breached on a daily basis.
· The electoral success of both Kadima and Labour is now inextricably linked to the success or failure of Ehud Barak’s intricate battle plan, and Egypt’s willingness to deal honestly and efficiently with its own problems in Sinai. However, in the meantime, Israel’s economic and diplomatic interests will simply have to suffer, and the loss of life in Gaza will obviously continue unabated.
· Hamas, too, will have to change their battle plan if their military wing is to survive intact. Their unwillingness to compromise on any issue, including the release of Gilad Shalit, whom they now say they have no concern over (in other words he has almost certainly been murdered), and the continued firing of rockets, will give Israel no choice but to continue Barak’s slow salami slice procedure of dismembering it.
· However, all the signs are that Israel will declare a unilateral ceasefire within days. The difficult task of explaining to the Israeli people what goals the operation has achieved will then fall onto Livni and Barak. Their success or failure at defending their positions will be reflected in the number of seats they win for their respective parties come the election on the 10 February.
Links:
For the best English language news site on Israel:
http://www.jpost.com/
For a vigorous Liberal-Left position of the Israeli daily paper:http://www.haaretz.com/
For a Centre-Left view on Israel, in occasionally appalling English: http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3083,00.html
For an insight into Arab and Muslim media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian issue, anti-Semitism, and other Middle East issues see:
http://www.memri.org/
For an overview of the media coverage of Israel see the BICOM (Britain Israel Research and Communications Centre) site. Below are the sites for -News headlines with links to each site:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/headlines
A written summary of the news:
news:http://www.bicom.org.uk/news
The main issues behind the news:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/briefings/behind_the_news/
Extracts from editorial and article Opinion:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/comment-and-opinion
A small selection of Quotes:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/quotes
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1 comment:
Looks as though you're being proved right again -- great job!
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