Gaza bust-out: Effects on the regional balance

Our Israeli commenter JES wrote here yesterday that it was notable how little attention was being paid in Israel to the momentous developments in Gaza. Today, Haaretz has a significant editorial chastizing Israel’s leaders for their lack of attention to Wednesday’s bust-out and underlining the effects the bust-out has been having on the political balance in the region. Its title is quite simply The siege of Gaza has failed.
For my part, I have been struck by the degree to which the bust-out has shown the Hamas leadership’s new ability to seize the strategic initiative, to conceive of a bold and unexpected plan, to maintain operational secrecy around implementation of the plan, and to integrate nonviolent civilian mass organizing into its strategic planning.
I also want to note this analysis from HaAretz’s long-time regional affairs correspondent Zvi Bar-el, which in many respects I agree with.
He writes:

At the beginning of the week, it still seemed as though Egypt was “standing firm” against these pressures. Egypt wanted to avoid yet another confrontation with Israel or Washington over the issue of the border crossing…
But domestic Egyptian considerations gained the upper hand. Hence, too, the tremendous media effort Egypt made this week to establish that they, and no other Arab party, had convinced Israel to lift the sanctions a bit – for example, to transfer fuel and also convoys of medicine to the Strip. The other “Arab party” that claimed the credit was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas… Khaled Meshal thanked both sides for their efforts, but made it clear that letting through a few more shipments of fuel did not constitute a solution to the problem of the siege.
The firing of Qassams on Sderot and the response by the Israel Defense Forces, both in killing Palestinians in the Zeitoun neighborhood and in the total closure that was imposed this week, have created a new equation, one that has become so familiar in Lebanon, in which Hamas comes out the winner no matter what. It can determine the number of Qassam rockets that are fired on the town and thus determine a criterion for “relative quiet,” “calm” or “noise.” It will thus dictate the Israeli response on the ground, and through that – the Arab reaction. Meshal can also determine whether to establish “Grapes of Wrath-type understandings” with Israel concerning Gaza, by means of the hudna (cease-fire) or tahadiyeh (temporary truce) that he has proposed and that has won support in Israel. In this he would also serve to further weaken the status of Abbas, who is not able to stop even one single Qassam.
Meshal has succeeded in proving to Israel, to the leaders of the Arab world and to the Quartet (the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations), that it will be impossible to discuss the Annapolis resolutions or any other political proposal without Gaza, which is to say – without him.
Abbas realized this week that as long as there is someone in Gaza who is dictating the mood in all of Palestine, he himself will not be able to be seen in an embrace with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni again. On Tuesday he did declare that the political negotiations must go on despite the events in Gaza.”
The events in Gaza have made clear to Abbas is that even if he does agree to enter into a political dialogue with Hamas, the points that the organization has accumulated this week, thanks to the suffering of the residents of the Strip, will enable it to dictate the terms of that dialogue.
It is no wonder that Hamas is again voicing its demand to hold early elections for the Palestinian parliament,

Actually, I am not as confident as Bar-El that Abu Mazen has yet concluded that there’s a new balance of power between him and Hamas and that he will necessarily have to distance himself from too close an embrace with Olmert, Livni, and the Americans as a result. Nor am I as confident as he that, as he writes, “both Egypt and Saudi Arabia believe that the most reasonable solution at the moment, considering the lack of confidence in Israel’s desire to conduct a serious political process, is to establish a joint Fatah-Hamas Palestinian Authority so that it will be possible at least to solve the problem of Gaza.”
Anyway, back to the HaAretz editorial. It says:

While politicians and the media are waiting with bated breath for publication of the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War, a new situation is taking shape on the Egyptian border that might eventually result in a new investigative committee. The diplomatic and security situation that arose on the Israeli-Egyptian border once the Egypt-Gaza border was flung wide open has apparently not yet penetrated the Israeli consciousness. But it is time to start asking pointed questions about the events of this week instead of about those of July 2006.

Instead of “instead of” there, I would say they should put “in addition to.”
Then this:

The border with Egypt was breached in a single moment, with no warning. It is impossible to refrain from asking whether any of our decision makers, or any of those who whisper in their ears, foresaw this scenario and prepared for it. When Vice Premier Haim Ramon boasts of the impressive decision-making process that preceded last fall’s military operation in Syria, his words sound bizarre in light of what is happening in the South.
While hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are streaming into Egyptian Rafah and Hosni Mubarak is having trouble reestablishing the border, while Hamas has succeeded in ending the siege of Gaza via a well-planned operation and simultaneously won the sympathy of the world, which has forgotten the rain of Qassam rockets on Sderot, Israel is entrenching itself in positions that look outdated. The prime minister speaks about the need to continue the closure on Gaza, and the cabinet voices its “disappointment” with Egypt – as if there were ever any chance that the Egyptians would work to protect Israeli interests along the Philadelphi route [i.e., the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt] instead of thinking first of all of their own interests. The failure of the siege of Gaza, which the government declared only a week ago to be “bearing fruit,” and especially the fear that this failure will lead to a conflict with Egypt, requires the government to pull itself together and prove that it has been graced with the ability to solve crises and to lead, not merely to offer endless excuses for its leadership during previous crises.
As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were streaming into Sinai by car and making a mockery of Israel’s policy in Gaza, the prime minister gave a speech at the Herzliya Conference that sounded disconnected from reality. There is little point in extolling the quiet on the northern border when a diplomatic and security crisis for which Israel has no solution is taking place in the South. The Qassam fire is continuing, the policy of sanctions on Gaza has collapsed and Hamas is growing stronger politically, militarily and diplomatically. It is clear to everyone that reestablishing the border along the Philadelphi route will be impossible without its consent. The confusion that characterized official Israeli responses to the international media shows that the developments in the Gaza Strip took the government completely by surprise.
In his speech, Ehud Olmert declared: “Mistakes were made; there were failures. But in addition, lessons were learned, mistakes were corrected, modes of behavior were changed and, above all, the decisions we have made since then have led to greater security, greater calm and greater deterrence than there had been for many years.” Olmert was referring to the Winograd report. But he categorically ignored the fact that what was happening in the South completely contradicts his statements. If that is what learning lessons looks like, if that is what deterrence means, the Olmert government has precious little to boast about.

I could scarcely have worded it better myself. Good judgments, Haaretz.