The Gaza Border is Open

(Israelnationalnews.com) The most significant fact about the demolition of Gaza's border fence with Egypt is that the Egyptians can no longer keep ordinary Gazans bottled up.

Well, well.  Perhaps there’s some comfort in recognizing that Israel isn’t the only government to be out-dared by the Hamas.  Israel’s siege of Gaza was half-hearted and half-witted, but it definitely had some effect.  In response Hamas thought up a brilliant solution—violent, harsh and simple.  Access between Gaza and Egypt is now quite open.  It was pretty open beforehand, and completely open to the smuggling of arms and munitions, but at least when the fence was up the Egyptians had some control over the rate of flow of arms and terrorists into the area.  Now they don’t even have that.

Moreover, it’s hard to see what the Egyptians can do about it.  I doubt they have the manpower to put the Gaza border back together and police it.  In part this is because of Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, which limits the number of Egyptian soldiers and policemen on the border.  The Egyptians have been agitating for a long time to get Israel to let them increase their forces on the border, but some vestige of the sense of self-preservation has kept Israel from agreeing to any but the most limited increase.  Who knows?  In a few days we may hear Ehud Barak musing about how a bigger Egyptian army on Israel’s border would be in Israel’s interest.  Let’s hope he doesn’t listen to himself.  Somehow I doubt that any large new accession of Egyptian soldiers on Israel’s border is going to concern itself primarily with Palestinians.

In one sense, the demolition of the border fence makes life easier for Hamas.  They can now drive explosives into Gaza by the truckload without messing with those cramped and claustrophobic tunnels.  There is a vast new commerce in cigarettes and gasoline for them to tax.  If I seem a bit cavalier about this, it’s because I really don’t think the new development will pose vast new security threats for Israel.  The vast security threats were going to happen anyhow.  They’ll just happen faster.

Yet it seems to me—it’s still too early to say—that the main political implications of the demise of the Gaza border arise from the fact that its most important function was not to keep arms and terrorists out of Gaza, but to keep Gazans in, something that was important to both Hamas and Egypt.  Egypt’s policy, as evidenced by its actions over the past several months, seemed to be to judiciously feed terrorists and arms into Gaza while keeping the exit from that cauldron of human misery firmly plugged. The plug has just been blown halfway across the Sinai Peninsula.

The presence of 200,000 Gazans in Egyptian Rafiah has two main implications, seemingly diametrically opposed, but both true.  First, if Israel had a demographic problem in Gaza, or seemed likely to if it reconquered the area, that demographic problem has just been reduced by 200,000.  Second, Hamastan has just annexed Egyptian Rafiah.  Gazans can now flood freely into Egypt and from there, given enough pluck and determination, anywhere they please.  Israel’s humanitarian problem with Gaza is now dwarfed by an Egyptian one.  It’s hard to see how the Egyptians can induce the Gazans to return to their prison by any means the world will consider acceptable.

I smell an opportunity here.

What if Israel were to discreetly offer a one-time reward of $5,000 per person, plus reimbursement of travel expenses, to any Palestinian family from Gaza that presents itself at an Israeli consulate in any country with which Israel has relations?  You could take fingerprints to ensure nobody picked up his reward twice.  True, they might pick up the reward and go back to Gaza, but it’s hard to imagine anybody voluntarily going back to Gaza once he’d made the decision to escape.  Israel might ask for the good services of Christian allies in America to make the reward available in countries where Israel doesn’t have diplomatic relations.  There are several large nations which are a) Islamic, b) poor (so those thousands of dollars let one live like a king), and c) have visa rules thatcan be made flexible with cash.  They shall remain nameless, but they know who they are. 

Egypt and Hamas could have prevented this solution by limiting exit from Gaza, but they really can’t do that anymore. Moreover, Egypt has suddenly acquired a huge new interest in moving Palestinians on.  It really ought to be Egypt offering that $5,000 reward from its embassies around the world, but I don’t expect them to see that.

The exodus of Palestinians from Gaza could go on for a long time and involve quite large numbers.  All that would be necessary is for Israel to continue to make life in Gaza intolerable, for which Hamas can be relied upon to provide an excuse.  It could come to the point where Palestinian residents of Judaea and Samaria, where life is hardly a picnic, became envious.  Israel could then consider what it might do to assuage that envy by including them in the reward. 

It would be naive to suppose that this policy could “solve” the Palestinian problem, lock, stock and barrel.  It won’t.  But it would change everyone’s calculus—Hamas’, other Palestinians’, Egypt’s, America’s, the Arab world’s—in ways that would be beneficial to Israel.  It’s hard to think of another policy that would accomplish this equally well.  If it works, it would be well worth the price.  Something to think about.