Egyptian delegation to break Gaza siege

The plan, as described on Hamas’s website here, could be huge. It will almost certainly have a much bigger impact than the two-small-ship siege-busting effort undertaken from Europe last month. That latter effort did a lot to focus European (and to a lesser extent, US and other western) attention on the gross injustices of Israel’s punitive, 30-month siege of Gaza. But in terms of actually either delivering goods to Gaza or changing the policies of the source-country governments, it did very little.
The Egyptian siege-busting project is being organized by a group from “the Egyptian judges club [association], parties, and popular forces,” and will aim to cross into Gaza from Egypt on October 9. Here’s what the Hamas website says about it:

Mahmoud Al-Khudairi, the chairman of the Alexandria club for judges, told Quds Press that the delegation would include 14 judges along with representatives of all syndicates, unions and parties.
He said that the delegation would leave from the relief committee at the Cairo doctors syndicate on 10/9 heading to Gaza and would carry whatever they could collect of foodstuff and medicine. He said that Egyptian MPs would join the convoy.
Dr. Hamdi Hassan, member of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc, urged all legal and relief organizations along with the Egyptian masses to join the delegation to break the siege.
He said, “I will go alone in my car and carry whatever it could take of food supplies and medicine, anyone is welcome to coordinate with me or with others”.

I have wondered for a while now why the many popular and political forces in Egypt who are strong sympathizers of the Palestinians, and who have chafed under the knowledge that their government has gone along with Israel’s plans to maintain a tight siege around Gaza, have not done more to challenge the siege from their side of the border. It is true that Gaza is a five-hour drive from Cairo, so organizing a convoy of siege-busters in a country in which the military-security forces play such a strong role is no small matter… I guess I simply concluded that these pro-Palestinian Egyptians– okay, primarily, the leaders of Egypt’s powerful but badly repressed Muslim Brotherhood– had judged that the time was not right to challenge the regime’s power, and its intent to keep its relations with Israel good at all costs, in this very head-on way.
Now, it seems, that calculus has changed.
The fact that the convoy organizers have announced their plans so publicly and so far in advance is a key tactic of nonviolent mass organizing, a strategy to which the Egyptian MB has been committed since the mid-1980s. What can or will the Cairo government do to stop them– especially during the holy month of Ramadan– that will not itself make the situation worse? Possibly, a lot worse?
This convoy could succeed in getting huge amounts of much-needed goods into Gaza. It could succeed in opening the Rafah crossing for considerably longer than just a few hours. And most crucially, at a time when Egypt is suffering fin-de-regime jitters that could well be a lot worse than any it has suffered since 1952, this project could put the MB and its agenda into a position in Cairo that is much stronger than anyone in the fortress-like US embassy there (and their Israeli allies/overlords) can be happy with.
Savvy JWN readers will know that Hamas was originally, back in 1987, a project of the Palestinian branch of the MB. Back in January, when Hamas felled the high barrier walls between Gaza and Egypt and organized the big “bust-out” of deprived Gazans across the felled walls to buy some badly needed basic supplies, Egypt’s ageing president Hosni Mubarak made a huge and partially successful effort to portray that bust-out as an “invasion” of Egypt’s national territory by those repressed, hunger-driven– and almost completely unarmed– souls.
You can access some of the commentary I wrote about that whole series of incidents, and about the crucial role that Egypt plays in the long-range planning of the Hamas leaders, here.
But now, it looks as though what the MB and its allies are planning for next month is a “bust-in” into Gaza, instead.
Watch this story as it develops.