Hamas-Cairo Connection Must Be Enforced
30 Dec 2011
By Khalid Amayreh
Ismael Haniya's visit to Cairo is undoubtedly a right
step, occurring at the right time and going in the
right direction.
For years, Haniya and other Palestinian Islamist
leaders, many of them elected by their own people in
free and fair elections, were treated as personas non-grata
by the defunct Egyptian regime of Husni Mubarak.
Not only that. The ex-president said nothing and did
nothing as Israel sought to decapitate the Gaza Strip
three years ago when the apartheid Zionist regime
launched its genocidal blitzkrieg on the
virtually-unprotected coastal enclave, killing,
maiming and incinerating thousands of men, women and
children.
Adding insult to injury and in order to receive a
certificate of good conduct from Israel and her
guardian-ally, the United States, the Mubarak regime
consolidated and tightened the manifestly criminal
siege on the Gaza Strip, leaving the 1.6 million Gaza
inhabitants to their fate.
Now, all of this has changed thanks to the great
Egyptian revolution which ousted Mubark and sent him
to jail where he should belong for the rest of his
life. Which really gives us the hope that a new
chapter of relations between Egypt and the
Palestinians will be opened.
The opening of this chapter will be necessary if the
Egyptian revolution is to acquire wider Islamist
legitimacy and if true democracy is to be allowed to
prosper in a country of more than 80 million who have
grown up, watching a Hitlerian Israel murder, savage
and humiliate their brethren in Palestine.
Haniya held gorgeous meetings with many Egyptian
dignitaries as well as the Secretary-General of the
Arab League, Nabil al-Arabi.
The elected Palestinian prime minister also had a
fruitful and cordial meeting with the leaders of the
Muslim Brotherhood who's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP)
has scored landslide victories in the two stages of
the ongoing Egyptian elections.
Hamas is ideologically affiliated with the Muslim
Brotherhood. Hence, the ascendancy of the Brotherhood
to influence and power in Cairo is likely to help the
Palestinians get rid of their erstwhile orphan status,
which enabled a notoriously Gestapo-minded Israel to
gang up on them anytime it wishes, with or without a
reason.
I don't think brother Haniya needs to be elaborative
or exhaustive in explaining to the Egyptian brothers
the situation in the Gaza Strip and the unrelenting
Nazi-like campaign of terror, murder and economic
strangulation the Zionist regime and its criminal
allies are carrying out against the thoroughly
tormented people of Gaza.
The steadfastness of Gazans is more than legendary. It
actually transcends reality.
I believe the Egyptian Muslim Brothers are fully aware
of the overall situation in Palestine. And they don't
need anyone to explain to them the suffering and dire
human conditions facing most Palestinians.
What they need instead is a practical prioritizing
strategy to enable them to help the Palestinian people
and their just cause more effectively while taking
into account objective political realities in Egypt
and the region.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not going to be at Hamas's
beck and call. And I don't think that Hamas envisages
such a possibility. In the final analysis, relations
between Islamic movements and countries are not
conducted in this way.
Non the less, the ascendancy of the Islamists to
power, either partially or fully, is undoubtedly a
development of paramount strategic importance that
must be fully utilized in order to rectify the
scandalously oblique balance vis-à-vis Israel.
It is true that Egypt is suffering from immense social
and economic problems at the home front, which means
that the country can't devote all or most of its
energies to the Palestinian issue.
However, the new Egypt will have to demonstrate to
Israel that a new strategic situation is already
taking place in the region, thanks to the Arab Spring,
and that Egypt will no longer tolerate the Nazi-like
treatment meted out to the Palestinians.
Egypt, and that is very important, should create a
real linkage between its own commitment to the Camp
David Peace Treaty with Israel on the one hand and
Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians on the other.
After all, all aspects of Israeli policies and
behaviors are squarely incompatible with the
stipulations of the hapless peace treaty, including
the scandalous settlement expansion, the unmitigated
Judaizing of East Jerusalem as well as the effective
killing of the two-state- solution possibility.
Apart from this, Egypt is demanded to play the role of
"Big Brother" for the Palestinian cause. Indeed, there
is a whole lot of issues that can be tackled in this
regard ranging from revoking travel restrictions to
allowing for unfettered travel from and to the Gaza
Strip via the Rafah border terminal.
Egypt should also help the Palestinians, especially in
the Gaza Strip, deliver themselves from the
humiliating dependence on Israel for their power and
fuel consumptions. We saw over the years the cruel and
sadistic use of fuel and electricity supplies from
Israel to the Gaza Strip whereby Israel resorted on
many occasions to cutting off these supplies for
political consideration and in order to torment and
humiliate the Palestinians.
In short, an Islamist-led Egypt would have to tell
Israel, straight in the eyes, that there cannot be
"business as usual" with the Jewish state if the
Palestinians continue to be savaged and brutalized and
pushed to the corner.
Needless to say, one of the immediate priorities in
this regard must be the lifting of the 4-year-siege on
Gaza. The people of Gaza have suffered too much and
for too long as a result of this barbarity.
©
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