Egypt, Israel and Sinai
The need for triangular co-operation
A jihadist attack on Egyptian and Israeli forces requires urgent
co-operation between the two countries—and with the Islamists of Hamas in
Gaza
Aug 11th 2012 | CAIRO, JERUSALEM AND RAFAH | from the print edition
THERE was no shortage of warning. In the 18 months since Egypt’s revolution,
Bedouin chiefs in the Sinai peninsula have voiced mounting concern about the
growing boldness of armed jihadist groups in their midst. In June a bunch of
them based in Gaza launched an attack via Sinai that left one Israeli dead.
In July jihadists released a video and leaflets promising to turn Sinai into
an Islamic emirate and demanding that Egyptian government forces should
impose sharia law or quit. On August 2nd Israel’s government called on its
own citizens to stay away from Sinai’s beach resorts, citing intelligence
warnings of a heightened risk. Three days later the Israelis fired a rocket,
killing a Palestinian motorcyclist in Gaza, who, they said, was a jihadist.
Retaliation beckoned.
Yet a few hours later, just before sunset, Egyptian soldiers manning a
desert checkpoint near the three-way junction of Egypt’s border with Israel
and the Gaza Strip took no precautions before sitting down to break their
Ramadan fast. Some still had food in their mouths when their bodies were
recovered. The masked men who pulled up in several cars showed no mercy,
blasting the checkpoint with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic
gunfire. They left 16 Egyptian servicemen dead.
Some of the attackers, wearing suicide-belts, then hijacked two armoured
personnel carriers and sped towards the Israeli border. One vehicle, laden
with explosives, failed to break through the barriers and caught fire. The
other penetrated more than a mile into Israeli territory before being hit by
a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter. The Israelis were evidently
readier than their Egyptian counterparts.
As Egyptian forces reinforced the northern part of Sinai, the risk of a
full-scale local revolt grew. Eye-witnesses in el-Arish, North Sinai’s
biggest town, reported half a dozen attacks by jihadists at midnight on
August 7th, with the airport and the road to Rafah, on the border with Gaza,
coming under fire. Egyptian forces chased the attackers to el-Touma, home of
the Qurn, a clan with links to extreme Islamists. Amid a partial news
blackout in Egypt, initial reports claimed that ground troops, backed by
helicopter gunships, had killed at least a score of the jihadists, though
locals were sceptical of the claim. A fierce counter-insurgency campaign is
now expected.
In Egypt blame was soon angrily flung around. Supporters of the “deep state”
that still dominates the security establishment were quick to castigate
Egypt’s newly installed, Islamist-tinted civilian government. President
Muhammad Morsi, they said, had foolishly relaxed controls on Egypt’s border
with the Gaza Strip, cosying up to his fellow Islamists in the Palestinian
Hamas movement that runs the enclave. They blamed Mr Morsi for letting
dangerous foreign elements infiltrate both Sinai and Gaza. Egypt’s new prime
minister, Hisham Kandil, was jeered and pelted with shoes at a state funeral
for the 16 servicemen. The Muslim Brotherhood, from which both Mr Morsi and
Hamas spring, suggested that Israel’s intelligence service had somehow
staged the attack.
Others pointed fingers at Egypt’s military rulers. On August 8th, perhaps
deliberately exploiting the army’s discomfiture, Mr Morsi threw down a
gauntlet to the generals by sacking a string of senior officers, including
the head of intelligence and the military governor of northern Sinai. This
may help Mr Morsi regain some of his prestige, which has plummeted since he
became president.
In the decades since Egypt recovered Sinai from Israel, following the peace
accords of 1979, a succession of generals appointed as governors has failed
to tackle the desert region’s malaise. A vicious security clampdown in 2004
following terrorist attacks on tourist resorts in southern Sinai, along with
immigration by Egyptians from the Nile Valley, alienated Sinai’s already
disgruntled Bedouin.
After Hamas took over the running of Gaza in 2007, prompting
Israel—unchallenged by Egypt’s government—to besiege it, the Palestinians
began digging hundreds of tunnels under the border with Egypt. This fostered
a bonanza of smuggling that profited Bedouin tribes, corrupt Egyptian
officials and the Islamists of Hamas. Arms smuggling in particular surged
last year, as rebels in Libya grabbed huge stocks of weapons accumulated
during the paranoid reign of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
Complaints from Israel and its Western allies over Sinai’s increasing
lawlessness have often been met with protests that the 1979 peace treaty
restricted Egypt’s army to a token, lightly armed presence. (An American-led
multinational monitoring force in Sinai is often attacked.) Last year Israel
agreed to let Egypt deploy an additional 1,500 men and to fly helicopters
near a border strip. But only now, in the wake of the attack, is Egypt
taking serious measures to seal the smuggling tunnels and hunt down the
jihadists in the region’s barren hills.
The Hamas conundrum
Alarmingly for Palestinians in Gaza, who have hoped for warmer ties with
Egypt in the post-Mubarak era, Egypt has again closed its official border
crossing, the territory’s only reliable outlet to the world. Fearful of an
anti-Palestinian backlash, Hamas expressed fulsome condolences for Egypt’s
fallen soldiers. Hamas has struggled to suppress jihadist extremism in Gaza
while at the same time exalting the right of its own people to fight Israel.
Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, led prayers in the road outside Gaza
City’s Egyptian consulate, with half his cabinet and hundreds of others
prostrating themselves in unison. He is said to have discussed the situation
for two hours with Egypt’s (later sacked) intelligence chief, Murad Mowafi,
and promised to improve co-operation. An Egyptian newspaper said Hamas had
provided the tip-off enabling an Egyptian helicopter to fire on jihadists on
August 7th near the border town of Sheikh Zwayed, where masked men in Afghan
dress were directing traffic.
For years Hamas has suppressed jihadists groups in Gaza, especially those
espousing puritanical Salafist ideals that hark back to the time of the
Prophet Muhammad. Hamas sought to prevent them from attacking hairdressers,
internet cafés, Christians and other supposedly decadent influences. But it
has been less eager to curb their missile attacks on Israel or to stop them
infiltrating Egypt.
More recently, however, Hamas has closed the tunnel complex to slow
infiltration and gun-running. If Hamas really wants to please the Egyptian
government, it would arrest the 200-odd jihadists still at large in Gaza.
Hisham Saidini, a jihadist preacher whom Hamas had freed soon after Ramadan
started last month, defended the killing of Egypt’s soldiers on the grounds
that they were protecting Jews.
Israel, too, will have to let both Egypt’s security forces and those of
Hamas in Gaza control their borders more effectively. Israel may have to
allow Hamas to operate in a buffer zone along Gaza’s eastern border. Egypt’s
air attack on the jihadists on August 8th was the first time that air power
had been deployed in anger by Egypt in Sinai since the war with Israel in
1973, and was co-ordinated with Israel in advance. The Israelis say they
have had several discreet high-level talks with the Egyptians since Mr Morsi
was sworn in a month ago.
The three governments also need to agree on new economic arrangements. For
the past five years, the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza that
fostered smuggling through the tunnels has hugely benefited people in Sinai
who are beyond the law—of any country. Opening the borders to legal traffic
and trade should lessen the power of jihadists and smugglers in Sinai and
Gaza, and thus strengthen the arm of the governments in Cairo and Jerusalem.
Mr Morsi seems well aware of the dilemma. Egypt’s main military academy and
senior civil posts have been opened up to the Bedouin, and plans are afoot
to improve the peninsula’s several hundred villages, many of which have no
piped water. He had already made a point, early in his presidency, of
visiting Sinai. He has also hosted Hamas leaders. Before the Sinai attack,
he received Mr Haniyeh and discussed definitively lifting Gaza’s siege.
Israel may also have to consider co-operating with Hamas, its avowed enemy.
After the attack on August 5th, Israel’s leaders were careful to blame
global jihadists rather than Gazans or Hamas. Although Egypt has yet fully
to open the crossing at Rafah, Israel has already reopened its one nearby at
Kerem Shalom, for trade if not yet for people. With the influence of
Islamists in Syria likely to grow in the event of Bashar Assad’s fall,
Israel may have to decide whether to accommodate itself to the likes of
Hamas lest a still fiercer version of Islamism comes to the fore.
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