Finally, Something Intelligent...

...is written about the current flare up in Israel-Palestine.

But when the Muslim Brotherhood government fell, the military leaders cracked down. They sentenced hundreds of the Brotherhood’s leadership class to death. They also closed roughly 95 percent of the tunnels that connected Egypt to Gaza, where the Brotherhood’s offshoot, Hamas, had gained power. 

As intended, the Egyptian move was economically devastating to Hamas. Hamas derived 40 percent of its tax revenue from tariffs on goods that flowed through those tunnels. One economist estimated the economic losses at $460 million a year, nearly a fifth of the Gazan G.D.P. Hamas needed to end that blockade, but it couldn’t strike Egypt, so it struck Israel. 

If Hamas could emerge as the heroic fighter in a death match against the Jewish state, if Arab TV screens were filled with dead Palestinian civilians, then public outrage would force Egypt to lift the blockade. Civilian casualties were part of the point. When Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy chief of the Hamas political bureau, dismissed a plea for a cease-fire, he asked a rhetorical question, “What are 200 martyrs compared with lifting the siege?” 

The eminent Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff summarized the strategy in The Times of Israel, “Make no mistake, Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel. But Hamas is firing rockets at Tel Aviv and sending terrorists through tunnels into southern Israel while aiming, in essence, at Cairo.”

A continuing flaw in how we think about about the Middle East is that we think it is about us. And by us, I mean the West and our only proxy in the Middle East, Israel. But the truth is, the conflicts exported by various Arab groups is about them -- and inter-Arab conflicts that having be raging for centuries. Even Al Queda declaring war against the US is really just a side proxy battle for Wahhabist control over Saudi Arabia.