Tribal Brotherhood
Speak ill of your enemies, but have full regard for your company.Terror militias comprised of Shia, alternately of Sunni Muslim agitator-jihadists have their very particular sectarian agendas, as proxies of various nations, each seeking hegemony over the larger Islamic community, but when outsiders, aliens, foreigners, infidels come on the scene, there can be a hudna-type reconciliation.
This phenomenon of human nature is seen at the micro- as well as the micro-level of human interactions.
And it's profoundly present in the conundrum the Islamic world presents to the greater world, and most particularly to that portion of the world at large that represents what Islam appears to have identified as Western, industrialized, democratic and free countries who have, they believe, set out to completely demonize Islam, deflate and humble its religious, social and political credentials.
Handily overlooking the demonstrated fact that it is from among their own disaffected fanatic Islamists that the first shots were fired across the bow of war disguised as religious competition. Correction: the kingdoms and sheikdoms, the tyrants and the theistic rulers, may very well understand what has occurred here, but they encourage the Arab street to identify their oppressors as the infidels, the Jews, lest they look crookedly at their rulers.
A kind of mob dementia of misidentification of the social morass in which they live, never quite able to lift themselves out of the constraints to comfortable living that poverty lays upon its masses. Feudalism has been a resounding success, so why look elsewhere for models certain to enrich the life experience of the many while impoverishing the entitlements of the few?
One sees how opportunity presents itself in a chaotic situation of invasion and war, resulting in an embattled population, desperate for surcease from destabilization, hoping for normalization, then coping with true desperation, against the tribal, sectarian hatreds unleashed. There is Iraq, and there is Lebanon, for example, and Egypt as well, where the founts of historical grievance spring anew at any opportune moment.
Away from the Arab world, we see the tribal bitterness and revenge-seeking in Africa, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Bosnia, playing out to deadly conclusions. But there are occasions when sworn enemies draw together in mutual support against the blight of the external enemy invading their territory. Hamas draws the support of Hezbollah; Sunni and Shia, both proxies of Iran and Syria. And in Jordan and Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood marches in support of both, Hamas's Big Brother after all.
Egypt has demonstrated great sympathy and forbearance in its compassion for the plight of Gaza's Palestinian population, hard-pressed by Israel to turn against their protectors who have placed them in their current plight by their unappeasable, unmitigated hatred of Israel. So the separating wall between Egypt and Gaza was breached by Hamas, and kindly Egypt permitted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to shop to their hearts' content.
How other to react in the face of a fait accompli?
And so they did, Egyptian shopkeepers emptying their store shelves and entrepreneurs herding cattle of all varieties to the border towns the better to conduct business, graciously accepting the windfall it offered them. Palestinians, claimed an advisor to Ismail Haniyeh, "were being squeezed to death", and the world "has got the message. This has been a great victory for Hamas."
The enemy, suffering countless attacks by Hamas terror-agents, sought the utility of declining to provide water, energy and medicines to those complicit in the ongoing attempts to destroy them. Where has there ever existed a state happy to provide the living wherewithal to an entity whose purpose was to destroy that state, claimed it openly, and enthusiastically went about its purpose? However, that is logic, and we speak of primal emotions and tribalism.
Now, Egypt is itself in a rather uncomfortable position. It appears helpless at the moment, to restrain the determined hordes of Palestinians from their continued determination to cross the border, enjoying freedom of movement, and the opportunities to shop. For goods available in Egypt are not as dear as they are in Gaza, and more plentiful in their variety understandably.
Israel offers Egypt the sole responsibility for the border, and recommends they also take responsibility for providing Gaza with water, fuel, food, medicines. Egypt demurs.
The United States urges Egypt to close the border once again, cognizant of Israel's fears that terror-agents and weaponry may now cross at leisure, importing their means of Israel's firm disposal from its current state of health and existence. Prodding Egypt with the promise that all the U.S. funding it so desperately depends upon may suddenly dry up.
Life is so unfair; President Hosni Mubarak's government is harried by its Islamist opposition, and the Egyptian man-on-the-street makes no secret of his antipathy toward Jews, his sympathy for fellow Arabs.
So the order went through and Egyptian border guards have done their best to try to prevent the further entry of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. While Gazans continue to pour their huge numbers over the breached border. Ultimatums? what are they, after all? There is still a lot of consumer items awaiting purchase by acquisitive-desperate Palestinians, unwilling to be restrained within their tight little border community.
Besides which, their protectors, garbed in their conventional black uniform, and well masked, those heroes, those partners of the Angel of Death, have continued demolishing the border wall. No wall, no constraints. Egyptian border guards unleash warning shots into the air, fruitlessly.
Shoppers will not be deterred from their mission. And the Palestinians, enraged at these feeble attempts to keep them from their goal, do to the Egyptians what they have so often done to Israeli police - toss stones with aimed accuracy.
The Egyptian border guards retreat. For now. Tomorrow is another day.
Labels: Middle East, That's Life, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 25, 2008
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