OPINION:
The spotlight on the sordid in the Middle East may be shifting from Syria, which is verging on the final implosion of the Assad government, to Gaza.
With 3 million refugees, more than 200,000 dead, a fractured multi-ethnic population that may not heal, Syria seems about to drop into relative obscurity. That’s despite the efforts of Daesh, the latest name for the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, to expand their barbarism from its protected base there.
A new situation in Gaza poses a threat that could make the Obama administration’s earlier failures pale. The Gaza Strip is only 25 miles long, its border with Egypt stretches only seven miles, and its border with Israel runs a little more than 30 miles, and it’s the home of 1,500,000 people. It has all the makings of the latest and hottest Middle East flash point. This time there will be no Israeli Defense Forces to restrain the violent chaos, as there was in the war last year.
There are hints of a new violence between Daesh and Hamas, the rulers since it held a one-man, one-vote election in January 2006, an election remembered for Hamas celebrating victory by throwing some of the losers of the Palestine Liberation Organization off the roof. The origins of Hamas as the Gaza wing of the “ultra-Sunni” Muslim Brotherhood, and its alliance with Tehran for arms and support, has made it the latest target for Daesh.
But a Sunni-Shia showdown is only one of the conflicts swirling about Gaza. Maj. Gen. Sami Turgeman, commander of the Israeli forces in the south who retires in two months time, tells Israeli reporters that periodic conflict with Hamas appears to be inevitable. “Hamas does everything in order to exhaust our society — that is part of their success,” he says, “everything to entangle us into using force against them in order to affect the next war.”
That clash could come sooner rather than later. In fact, no sooner had Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made cooing noises to the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) summit he is currently hosting, than Freedom Flotilla II was launched, obviously with tacit government support. This time the flotilla has support from several leading Turkish celebrities, recalling the May 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that set out to break the Israeli embargo. When Israeli forces boarded the ship in international waters to search it for arms, nine Turks were killed. This gave the Erdogan regime a pretense for a break in what had been a strong Israeli-Turkish military alliance. Soon the regime began pumping out outlandish Islamist propaganda, giving Hamas its most effective international base.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is pressuring Hamas, identified by the United States and most Western countries as a terrorist organization, to eliminate the Iranian-assisted rebels operating in the Sinai. In effect, there’s a Sunni Arab-Israeli alliance to throttle Hamas. That’s after the overthrow of a popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood regime. Mr. el-Sissi, in turn, has been flirting with Vladimir Putin, sensing that an imploding Bashar Assad regime he has steadfastly supported might be trying to revive the spirit of the Nasser-Brezhnev Arab-Soviet alliance.
Complicated? This is the new Islamic world order President Obama professed to see in his famous speech in Cairo in 2008. He has since proclaimed that he wants to “lead from behind” in the Middle East. He imagined that leading from behind would be easy. Exactly behind whom he would lead is not clear.
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