Opening of Rafah border is beginning of end of blockade

Sunday, May 15, 2011
By Jason Koutsoukis

When Fawzi Alhelou, 16, heard the news that Egypt would soon open its border with the Gaza Strip, the first thing that came to mind was the Swiss Alps.

“Ice and snow are the most faraway things from Gaza I can imagine,” Alhelou said from his home in Gaza City this week.

“I won't be going to Switzerland next week, but I like to know that if I really want to leave Gaza, even if it's just for the day, then I can.” After the Palestinian faction Hamas won control of Gaza in 2007 in a showdown with its rival Fatah, Egypt's then president, Hosni Mubarak, joined with Israel to seal Gaza's borders to try to weaken Hamas.

Now, with Mubarak out of power and Egypt months away from conducting the first round of genuine multiparty elections, the country's caretaker government has moved quickly to redefine longstanding foreign policy positions such as supporting the Gaza blockade.

The day after Egypt successfully brokered a reconciliation pact between Hamas and Fatah, the Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi announced that the border with Gaza would soon be re-opened permanently.

“It all started with the new government that came after the revolution,” Al-Arabi told The Washington Post this week.

“The government, which is now two months old, made it very clear from the first day that we want to open a new page with all the countries in the world.”

Al-Arabi says that in the Gaza Strip, Egypt's new priority is to alleviate the suffering of its people.

“We will provide for the needs of the people of Gaza. This is very important for us. The United Nations, the EU, they have asked us for that.”

While the Rafah border crossing appears set to open on a permanent basis, it will not necessarily provide for a free flow of Gazans across the border into Egypt. Men aged between 18 and 40 will be required to obtain a visa, a bureaucratic hurdle that can take weeks to process.

“This is not everything that we would have wanted, but it's a start,” says Ramadan Ajrami, a journalist and political commentator who lives in Rafah, at the southern end of the tiny Palestinian territory.

“For the first time in many, many years we are actually hearing senior Egyptian government officials, such as the Foreign Minister, talking in terms of the indignities being inflicted on the Palestinian people by the blockade.

“The opening of the Rafah crossing, even if it is limited to some extent, means recognition for one of the most basic human rights -- freedom of movement.”

Nearly 12 months since a Turkish-flagged flotilla tried to enter Gaza in an attempt to break the blockade -- and created world headlines when Israeli naval commandos halted the flotilla in international waters and shot dead nine Turkish activists in the process -- some analysts believe the opening of the Rafah crossing marks the beginning of the end of the blockade.

“This is post-revolutionary Egypt,” says a Palestinian rights activist, Noura Erakat, who is an adjunct professor of international human rights law at Georgetown University, Washington. “The Egyptian people ended the 30-year regime of a despot, and now the will of the people is starting to be reflected in Egyptian foreign policy.

“The Egyptian street has always been overwhelmingly in favor of Palestinian rights, they have never supported the blockade, and this decision is one very big crack in the blockade that will only widen as time passes.”

In Erakat's view, Egypt's brokering of a truce between Fatah and Hamas, in addition to its decision to open its borders with Gaza, in effect ends Egyptian collusion with Israel.

“Israel's narrative has been that the real threat to the region is Hamas, that Hamas has thwarted the peace process, but Egypt is now chipping away at that, undermining that, and leaving the government of Benjamin Netanyahu increasingly isolated.”

As far as Israel is concerned, opening Rafah without proper international supervision would violate a signed agreement between Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority and may be illegal.

As for the general direction being taken by Egypt in the wake of Mubarak's fall, Israeli politicians and security analysts are starting to feel anxious.

“The Egypt we knew until the civilian uprising is disintegrating,” wrote the commentator Alex Fishman in a recent column in Israel's biggest-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

While much of the Western world welcomed the tumultuous events in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in January that eventually forced Mubarak from office, Fishman seemed to speak for many Israelis as he lamented the apparently weak hand of the Egyptian military leadership.

“This is happening because the military leadership is unwilling to confront, on any subject, the Egyptian public. It is willing to reach understandings with the Muslim Brotherhood, it surrenders to the whims of the young people in the square, it grovels to the middle class.”

Jason Koutsoukis is Middle East correspondent at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He has been based in the region since May 2008.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

Source: Tehran Times.
Link: http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=240708.