DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - EGYPT/ISRAEL/PALESTINE: WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF HAMAS CONQUERED EGYPT?!?

Cairo has more to fear from Hamas than Israel
by Bret Stephens

WHAT if Gaza were to conquer Egypt? The possibility is not as remote as it may seem just by glancing at the map.

Egypt has more than 50 times the population of its former colony and 2800 times the landmass.

But Gaza is sovereign Hamas territory, Hamas is the Palestinian branch of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and Egypt - not Israel - is the country that has most to fear from a statelet that is at once the toehold, the sanctuary and the springboard of an Islamist revolution.

No wonder liberal Egyptians are reacting with near-hysterical alarm to the demolition of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai last month.

The Brotherhood organised at least 70 demonstrations throughout Egypt early last week to protest Israel's economic blockade of Gaza, itself a reaction to Hamas's frequent rocket barrages into Israel.

"Arm us, train us and send us to Gaza," chanted the demonstrators, along with "O rulers of Muslims, where is your honour, where is your religion?"

The independent Egyptian daily Almasry Alyoum also described conversations between Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the Brotherhood's supreme guide, to co-ordinate their activities. "We will take to the streets and defend our brothers in Gaza, even if we are all tried in military courts," Mr Akef was reported as saying.

As Middle Eastern power plays go, Hamas's decision to dismantle the Gaza-Sinai border was a masterstroke.

Gaza's economic woes are almost wholly self-inflicted, but they are real. Dynamiting and bulldozing the border of a neighbouring country is legally an act of war, but it was made to seem like a humanitarian necessity and a bid for freedom. Flooding that neighbour with hundreds of thousands of desperate people is a massive economic burden on Egypt, but one that it shirks at its political peril.

Above all, Hamas exploited the myth of pan-Arab solidarity with the Palestinians in order to explode it.

Having whipped itself into its usual frenzy over Israel's "siege" of Gaza, it was a delicate matter for the state-run Egyptian press to make the Government's case for deploying truncheon-wielding police to turn back the Palestinian human tide. It's an equally delicate matter for the Egyptian Government to arrest Brotherhood protesters peacefully demonstrating "for Palestine", even if the Brotherhood's real target is Hosni Mubarak's regime and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty it supports.

For Palestinians who have spent squalid decades in the refugee camps of Lebanon (which forbids Palestinians from owning property or having any sort of gainful employment), or been systematically abused as labourers in the Gulf sheikdoms (Kuwait expelled its Palestinian population en masse following its 1991 liberation from Iraq), or had a country denied to them by a Hashemite regime in Jordan, the lies of the Arab world are well-known.

Still, it must have seemed to Palestinians an especially galling contrast that Israel announced the resumption of fuel supplies to Gaza just as Egypt was cutting its deliveries of fuel and foodstuffs to its border towns of Rafah and El Arish in the Sinai, in order to keep the Palestinians out. For good measure, Egyptian sources tell me the Government also arrested 3000 Gazans this week who had made their way to Cairo - yet another betrayal that will surely linger in Palestinian memory for a long time.

For the Brotherhood, all this is excellent news.

This week, Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian minister in President Mahmoud Abbas's cabinet, reportedly sought a meeting in Cairo with supreme guide Akef in order to negotiate a new border arrangement.

Mr Akef declined to see him, a telling indicator of the Brotherhood's newfound political confidence. It can now lay firm claim to the Palestinian cause, never mind that its "brothers" in Hamas are the real source of current Palestinian misery.

By contrast, the Egyptian Government faces a serious quandary, and not just as a matter of rhetoric.

By its treaty with Israel, it is forbidden from deploying its army in large numbers to the Sinai. In previous years, it used this restriction as an alibi in its lacklustre efforts to prevent the arms flow from Sinai to Gaza. Now that flow threatens to go in the opposite direction, endangering not just Israel but also Egyptian tourist resorts such as Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh.

The Egyptian-Israeli treaty may ultimately have to be revised to take account of the changing facts on the ground. Israel, too, will have to rethink some basic assumptions.

Supporters of Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan can take a measure of satisfaction in noting Gaza is increasingly becoming an Arab problem rather than an Israeli one.

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1) Cairo has more to fear from Hamas than Israel