Opinion: Who pulled the trigger in Gaza, and why?

Fire and smoke rise following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Photo / AP

OPINION:

In late July I attended an academic seminar in the town hall of a kibbutz on the Gaza envelope. The presentations were interesting, but the lunch afterwards was better.

The smiling lady who prepared the food took delight in our compliments and sent us away with more food than we could manage and would not accept any refusal. She reminded me of so many people I had met before.

This was my first visit to Israel/Palestine, after spending over a decade in Arab-majority countries. It struck me how ‘Middle Eastern’ Israelis are in their dedication to hospitality and the rituals of food, community, and people.

I learnt overnight that that lady was killed in the cataclysmic violence that has engulfed southern Israel/Palestine since Saturday. Who is to blame for her death and so many others like her on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide?

The answer is not simple, and at root, we all are. However, for now it is important to pinpoint the most immediately culpable, to expedite the fastest path to stopping the violence.

Already global political-media machines are in overdrive looking to shape the narrative and steer outrage in directions advantageous to various actors in this lethal game. One area that is already subject to significant obfuscation is the role of Egypt in this affair.

The emerging narrative is that Egypt tried to warn the Israelis of the impending attack, which absolves them of any culpability or negligence in upholding their part of the decades-long bargain that has allowed the Egyptian military/deep state to prosper (even through the earthquake of the Arab Spring) via $1.3 billion in annual US military aid and monopolies over large parts of the Egyptian economy.

Their part of the bargain was to help secure southern Israel and keep a lid on Gaza, wedged between the Egyptian and Israeli borders. The obvious villain in this narrative, therefore becomes Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who failed to register the warnings that the Egyptians sent them – three days before Operation Al Aqsa Flood, according to US reports.

However, this narrative is problematic for several reasons, and not because Netanyahu immediately rejected them as ‘totally fake news.’

Dr Leon Goldsmith.

It is important to note first my conversations with the Israelis in recent months which contained a common theme, which was clearly misplaced, that Hamas was becoming politically ‘domesticated’; was occupied with ruling Gaza and had no interest in risking their position by provoking the IDF.

The Israeli view was that the main threat to Israeli security in the south came from the radical Islamic Jihad militias – who continued to launch Qassam rockets in spite of Hamas’s attempts at restraining them – and Hizballah to the north.

There was absolutely no sense that a ground attack from Gaza was possible, in fact I jogged along the perimeter fence with an Israeli tour guide/IDF reservist and a Moroccan colleague – a anecdote for the completely false notion of improving security relations due to the Abraham Accords, which brings us back to Egypt who was side-lined by the Accords.

The Egyptians likely did send a message to the Israelis three days before the attack; however, that message was possibly deliberately vague, which could explain why the Israelis did not take register it or take it seriously.

But here lies the troubling part. The timing of the warning provided Cairo with crucial cover against the accusations of complicity or negligence that would come three days later. This alibi was stiffened when the US confirmed that a warning had come, with the Egyptians ensuring that the US received a copy.

Nonetheless, a hypothesis emerges that Egypt was less than up front in its communications before the attack and in fact knew precisely when and what was coming on the 50-year anniversary of Egypt’s most famous surprise attack on Israel – the 1973 October War (known in Israel as Yom Kippur War).

The number of rockets fired into Israeli territory since Saturday shows that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had obtained a very large arsenal of Iranian rockets. Building up this arsenal would have taken months, and it is almost impossible to conceive that Egyptian intelligence could have been unaware of it.

So, the next question is why would Egypt want to risk playing with fire by not preventing an escalation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict? A situation which was already highly combustible due to the hard-line policies of the current Israeli government and the rising sense of desperation and hopelessness among Palestinians.

It is important to remember that the Egyptian military regime led by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to a large degree depends for its existence on the proceeds of its role as a key US ally and guarantor of Israeli security.

Earlier this year the US blocked the transfer of $235 million in funding to the Egyptian regime, citing concerns over human rights. Furthermore, the US and its Gulf Allies in Saudi Arabia and UAE have pressured the Egyptian military to privatise military-owned firms in Egypt. These changes come within the context of the Abraham Accords – normalisation deals between the Arab states of UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan and Israel, which began in 2020.

On September 20 the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman made the strongest indication yet that Saudi Arabia, who undoubtedly gave the blessing for its GCC allies to join the Accords, would also sign, when he stated in an interview with Fox News, ‘every day we get closer to normalization with Israel.’ The combined effect is that the deep state in Egypt feels that the central plank of its power is being kicked away.

So basically, the Egyptian regime is saying to the US and Israelis that ‘you’ll never achieve stability without us, even the Saudis cannot help you on this.’ At the same time President Sisi seems to be trying to bolster his regime’s domestic legitimacy through the events as insurance against being rendered irrelevant to the US and Israel.

Al-Azhar al Sharif, Egypt’s most important religious institution, which never contradicts official government policy, posted on its Arabic Facebook account: ‘Al-Azhar … prays that God inspires them [the Palestinians] in the face of the Zionists and terrorism.’ This new line of communication was followed up by a statement from President Sisi overnight (translated from the Arabic): ‘Egypt’s strategic choice is peace...And that is why we must not leave our brothers in precious Palestine until they get their rights.’

It is clear that Egyptian regime seeks through this explosion of the conflict to leverage itself back into the centre of Palestinian-Israeli affairs, an area where Abraham Accord states have trodden on their toes. For Egypt’s military autocrats astride a restive population this is an existential issue.

The bottom line is that there are many drivers of the conflict in Israel/Palestine, but one of the critical triggers was the efforts of one of the region’s autocratic ruling regimes to save itself from irrelevance and possible extinction. Ultimately, unaccountable, narcissistic leaders only bring disaster for nations and the innocent victims in Israel and Palestine who have so much in common.

Dr Leon Goldsmith is co-founder of Middle East and Islamic Studies Aotearoa (MEISA) and a senior lecturer in Middle East and Comparative Politics in the Politics Programme at the University of Otago.