...Egypt has been trying to play a delicate game: keep Hamas in the game by allowing them to bring in weapons, cash, and terrorists, but not so conspicuously that it causes a serious American or Israeli backlash.

But today, Hamas just blew the border fence down. Suddenly, some of the pressure that has built up in Gaza over the past several months has been released, and it didn’t go toward Israel — it went into Egypt, and now the Egyptians are faced with a calamitous situation.

Egypt has been hoisted with its own petard, and it is really quite enjoyable to see from a strategic perspective. Hamas probably blew up the border fence with explosives that Egypt allowed it to smuggle into Gaza. Heh.

...The biggest problem with Gaza, from Israel’s perspective, is that Israel has withdrawn and yet the world still sees Gaza as occupied. An intolerable situation was created in which Israel sacrificed all the military and civilian advantages of being there but continued paying the price: Gaza remained dependent on the Jewish state for fuel and food. The only way to "end the occupation" was to cut itself off completely, which the world called a “seige” so long as Gazans had no way in or out...

...With the floodgates open, there is no siege. The occupation is over. Gaza is now Egypt’s problem.

I’d love to share some of the optimism here, so could someone please explain to me why the following couldn’t happen:

1. Hamas uses the open border to rapidly strengthen both its offensive (guns and missiles) and defensive (cement for bunkers and tunnels) capacities.

2. The international community refuses to let Israel off the hook and instead insists that it remains responsible for supplying the Gazans with fuel, medicine and electricity.

3. Hamas continues to target Israel from civilian areas knowing that any Israeli response, however measured, will likely be reported on unsympathetically by much of the international press.

In other words, why aren’t we looking at more of the same, only worse?

...let us suggest that what some see as a problem to be concerned about may also be an opportunity to be seized on, because it could be a first step in getting the world to perceive that many of the residents of Gaza are Egyptians rather than Palestinians. They'd rather be in Egypt than in Gaza, as they showed by voting with their feet these past days. They speak Egyptian Arabic. They have closer family ties to Egypt than they do to the West Bank, where many of them have never even visited.

Rather than forcing the Gazan Arabs to join with the West Bank Arabs into a state of "Palestine" that has never before existed and has few of the elements of a successful nation-state, why not let Gaza revert to its pre-1967 status as part of Egypt? Egypt, at least is a country with which Israel has a peace treaty and diplomatic relations, which is more than can be said for the Hamas terrorist organization that now controls Gaza.

Were Gaza to become an Egyptian responsibility, Israel would no longer be reduced to complaining about arms smuggling across the Gaza-Egypt border. It could hold Egypt directly responsible for the rocket attacks on the Israeli city of Sderot, and America could use its $1.8 billion a year in aid to Egypt as leverage to demand the cessation of the attacks. If the plan of letting Gaza merge into Egypt works, it could be a model for allowing Jordan, another country with which Israel has a treaty of peace, to accept responsibility for parts of the West Bank. In the crisis along the Egypt-Gaza border could lie the seeds of a just resolution to the so-called Palestinian question.

For all intents and purposes, the following dialog is taking place between jihadists and the Left:

Jihadists: Kill the Jews.
The Left: Of course. You want an end to settlements.
Jihadists: Kill the Jews.
The Left: We understand you. You want freedom of movement without chekpoints.
Jihadists: Kill the Jews.
The Left: How poetic your language is. You want an independent state.
Jihadists: Kill the Jews.

Nowadays, crazy anti-Zionism has spread way beyond the Left.