The praises of Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Khaled Mashal for Egypt, its President and its intelligence services, as well as his mention of the disagreement with Iran over the stance on Syria, confirm that the man and his movement have left Damascus to settle in the axis of the Muslim Brotherhood, stretching from Tunis to Cairo to Istanbul, through Doha, where the Muslim Brotherhood's international headquarters is located – in other words the axis opposed to Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, or to the so-called “Shiite Crescent". Officials from this axis say that “defiance has ended", and that they have taken back the Palestinian “cause" and those originally concerned with it to place it in its correct religious and political ideological framework, after it had been hijacked by “others" who had made of it their vehicle for leading the (Pan-Arab) “nation" astray. And here is this “nation" putting a stop to their actions. This is the simplified image that has been consecrated by the political and media discourse over the past few years, and has become entrenched in people's minds, mobilizing them to fight for it, not to fight for the Palestinian issue. It is an image that is as far as can be from strategic political thinking and from any vision for the future of the region, one that drowns in the past to save it with the blood of the faithful. Israel, and with it or before it the United States, knows this truth full well, and bases on it the direction it takes in politics and in war. It knows that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad joining the Cairo-Ankara axis would mean depriving them of the Iranian weapons and funding that used to be smuggled to Gaza, and allowing them to record a moral victory in the latest offensive on the Gaza Strip. It thus wagered on this, setting a “modest" goal for the war, one that would get rid of the missiles which the leadership of the Palestinian Resistance admitted were from Iran, but refrained from mentioning that Syria (before it became exhausted by its own internal wars) played a major part in developing and transporting these weapons, in addition to the role played by Hezbollah in terms of training, smuggling and support. Netanyahu and Israel's military and civilian leaders assert that the goal of the war has been achieved, and that most of the missiles have either been destroyed or fired. They are now wagering on the fact that the dispute between Hamas and Iran, as confirmed by Mashal, will deprive the Resistance of renewing its arsenal, especially as Syria the regime is drowning in its own wars, and as the struggling Syrians have no time to take notice of what goes on beyond their borders, not to mention the fact that they themselves are pleading for the world to supply them with weapons. As for Hezbollah, the third party with a hand in arming Gaza, it is drowning in domestic Lebanese issues and will drown even more in this sectarian and confessional quagmire. It will become isolated, its influence not exceeding its own sect, it will not be able to renew and develop its weapons because its supply route is being disrupted by the wars in Syria, and its hands will become even more tied if the regime falls into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is Israel's wager in the phase of major changes in the Middle East: eliminating armed popular forces by making them join the camp of peace with guarantees from Egypt, and dividing the countries that oppose its policies, drowning them in internal wars. In other words, it is looking at things from a realistic point of view, paying no heed to the movement of peoples which surprises everyone, as it did in the Arab Spring and as it is doing now in Egypt, where the street is rising up and demanding to be freed of the Muslim Brotherhood's hegemony and of its attempts to reproduce the former regime in terms of domestic and foreign policy, with religious slogans which it seems most Egyptians have overcome. The Palestinians also might overcome Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, as the movement of peoples is limitless – and saving the past with the blood of the present is impossible.
