Egypt Versus Gaza

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Reports
11 July '10

There is a bit of silver lining, even in the Gaza cloud. It’s this: the Egyptian government, aware that the West won’t help it get rid of the revolutionary Islamist regime there, that Israel cannot do it, and that Hamas won’t voluntarily accept subordination to the Palestinian Authority, now understands it has to protect itself from that threat.

For Egypt, the threat is multiple. Most directly, Hamas is a close ally to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a group that wants to overturn the nationalist regime and give Egypt an Islamist state that would enjoy all the blessings of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan. In or after their revolution, the Egyptian elite would be murdered and all of its property confiscated.

A second threat to Egypt comes from the fact that Hamas is an Iranian client. The days are long gone when Egypt could credibly present itself as the leader of the Arab world and the trend-setter for the region, but it still has a real national interest in what happens elsewhere in the area.

Iran is a threat to Egypt in four ways: Persian versus Arab; Shia versus Sunni; Islamist versus nationalist; and Iran versus Egypt on a state-to-state level of competition. One might well think of a hostile Gaza Strip in relation to Egypt as parallel to what a Communist Cuba has been to the United States.

On a third level, Gaza could easily become a safe haven for terrorists operating against Egypt. Any weapon smuggled into Gaza, for example, could reappear some day in an attack on tourists in Cairo.

With Egypt approaching its first "normal" transition of leadership in forty years the government seems to be all the more nervous about such things.

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