Israel and Hamas have
reportedly accepted a long-term truce mediated by the Egpytian
government that is mostly the same as a deal offered in the first
week of fighting that Israel accepted but Hamas declined.
Nevertheless, this time Hamas declared the truce a “victory.” The
deal will extend the distance from the coast Palestinian fishermen
can operate it and will ease restrictions on trade and travel at
Gaza’s Israel-controlled border checkpoints. Hamas also wanted an
airport and seaport in Gaza while Israel wanted Hamas to
demilitarize. These and other issues will be revisited if the truce
can last through September.
The truce is no victory for Hamas or the Israeli government, but
if it holds it will be a victory for Israelis and Palestinians
because it will bring a respite from rocket launches and
retaliatory military strikes. It’s also a victory for Egypt, which
mediated negotiations between two sides that as a matter of policy
don’t talk to each other.
While Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. “strongly
supported” the truce he also said he understood it was an
“opportunity, not a certainty,” which is certainly true. In the
beginning of the fighting, Kerry was heavily involved in trying to
get Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce but toward the end even
the Israeli left had enough of him. President Obama defended Kerry,
calling criticism of his attempts to negotiate a truce
unfair. “He has been persistent. He has worked very hard,” the
president said. Reserving judgment on Kerry’s skills as a
negotiator, his attempt to negotiate a truce was doomed from the
start. The U.S. plays too active a role, yet is not vested enough
in the situation in Israel, to have acted as an effective
negotiator.
Egypt, with which the Gaza strip also shares a tightly
controlled border, which sends aid to Gaza, and which has a 35 year
old peace deal with Israel, was far better positioned to negotiate
a truce than the U.S. America’s participation in negotiations may
have also made them harder to succeed by drawing so much public and
press attention to the process. In those conditions, Israeli and
Hamas negotiators might have been more interested in not appearing
weak in the court of public opinion.
Even Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president (Hamas is also a part
of the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement) Mohammed Morsi
understood the role Egypt could play in getting Hamas to agree
in a truce, in one of the previous military campaigns over Gaza in
2011. Egypt’s ability and willingness to participate constructively
in matters of regional security illustrates some of the benefits of
U.S. non-interventionism. Countries like Egypt will only step up to
keep their regions stable if they are weaned off the idea the U.S.
is responsible for stability everywhere.
In that vein, Egypt, along with the United Arab Emirates, also
recently
conducted air strikes against radical Islamist militants making
gains in Libya. That country has been sliding into instability
since the West’s hit-and-run intervention in 2011 that helped an
assortment of rebels overthrow the government of Col. Qaddafi,
leaving that government’s massive weapons stockpiles for the taking
of all kinds of miltiants,
from Nigeria to Syria. Despite the Obama administration’s
contribution to this chaos, the U.S. government appeared to lament
Egypt’s “intervention” in Libya as an “escalation” of the turmoil,
according to USA Today. Yet Egypt is far more staked
in a stable Libya than the U.S. is, and their willingness to step
up there too is more evidence that U.S.
non-intervention can spur regional powers to take more
responsibilities and not, as interventionists argue, create more
chaos. In fact, that’s what interventions tend to do.
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