Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas-Fatah
deal in Cairo was both swift and predictable. “The Palestinian Authority
must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no
possibility for peace with both,” he said, in a televised speech shortly
after the Palestinian political rivals reached a reconciliation agreement under
Egyptian sponsorship on April 27.

Despite numerous past attempts to undercut Mahmoud Abbas,
stall peace talks, and derail Israel’s commitment to previous agreements,
Netanyahu and his rightwing government are now arguing that Palestinians are
solely responsible for the demise of the illusory “peace
process.”  Israeli bulldozers
will continue to carve up the hapless West Bank to make room for more illegal
settlements, but this time their excuse may not be “natural
expansion.” The justification might instead be Israel has no partner. U.S.
and other media will merrily repeat the dreadful logic, and Palestinians will,
as usual, be chastised.

But frankly, at this juncture of Middle East history, Israel
is almost irrelevant. It no longer has a transformative influence in the
region. When the Arab people began revolting, a new dimension to the
Arab-Israeli conflict emerged. As the chants in Cairo’s Tahrir Square began to
adopt a pan-Arab and pro-Palestinian language, it became obvious that Egypt
would soon venture outside the political confines of Washington’s patronizing
labels, which divide the Arabs into moderates (good) and radicals (bad).

A day after the handshakes exchanged by chief Fatah
representative, Azzam al-Ahmed, and Hamas’s leaders, Damascus-based Dr. Moussa
Abu Marzouk and Gaza-based Mahmoud Al Zahar, the forces behind the agreement in
Cairo became apparent. While Israeli leaders used the only language they know
for these situations — that of threats, intimidation and ultimatums — the U.S.
response was flat, confused and extraneous. Aside from the outmoded nature of
U.S. officials’ remarks, the focus was largely placed on the only leverage the
U.S. has over Abbas and its Fatah allies. Jennifer Rubin wrote in her
Washington Post blog on April 29: “The Obama administration is reluctant
to articulate clearly a position that if a Hamas-Fatah unity government emerges
as Mahmoud Abbas has been describing, the U.S. will cut off aid.”

The temporary reluctance is not pervading, however.
“Congress is an entirely different matter,” Rubin wrote, quoting an
angry, unnamed official: “The only acceptable answers (to whether the U.S.
should fund the new Palestinian government) for most Americans would be no or
hell no.”

But how effective will such financial arm-twisting be,
especially with the possibility of other donor countries following suit?

If the question had been asked prior to the Arab Spring —
and the Egyptian revolution in particular — the answer would have been marred
by uncertainty. A whole class of Palestinian politicians had arranged their
stances almost exclusively around funding issues.

What really allowed Israel and the U.S. to control the
outcome of political events, even internal Palestinian affairs, was the lack of
any real political balance surrounding this conflict. The U.S. and its allies
defined the will of the “international community,” and the region was
trapped in Washington’s — and Tel Aviv’s — political designations of friends
and enemies. It was a political stalemate par excellence, and only Israel
benefited.

This analysis is not merely relevant to recent events. The
greatest Israeli gain of the Camp David agreement (1979) was not of bringing
peace to the region — for no regional peace truly followed. It was the total
marginalization of Egypt as a powerful Arab party from virtually all Arab
affairs of concern to Israel. The absence of Egypt in the process made it
possible for Israel to repeatedly attack Lebanon, and also to further its
colonization and destruction of the Occupied Territories.

Now Egypt is back — not merely in terms of a return to the
“Arab fold” — but as the party that will increasingly define the new
Arab reality. The signing of the Hamas-Fatah deal may have come as a surprise
in terms of media coverage, but it was really a predictable consequence in a
chain of events that signaled the remaking of a region. Now the Middle East is
spearheaded by a powerful Arab country, secure enough to reach out to multiple
partners – other Arab countries, as well as Iran, Turkey and others.

Not only did Turkey welcome the deal, it was also one of the
main sponsors of the Palestinian rapprochement. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu has been instrumental in pushing for Palestinian unity. As for the
Iranian position, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi hailed the
“auspicious” agreement, which he described as “one of the
achievements of the Egyptian revolution,” according to the Tehran Times
(April 30).

The Israeli vision for the region was to keep it politically
divided at any cost. Without such a division, Israel is likely to be on the
defensive, and the U.S. will be consumed in crisis management. A Palestinian
unity in post-revolution Egypt, with the blessing of all Arab countries, Turkey,
Iran, and many others, is an extremely worrying prospect for Israel. Of most
concern is the rise of Egypt as a political party, one that is capable of
making decisions on its own. Aside from sponsoring the unity agreement between
Hamas and Fatah, without Israeli or U.S. 
permission, Egypt’s new foreign minister, Nabil al-Arabi, also described
the decision to seal off Gaza as “shameful,” and he promised to lift
the siege (as reported by Aljazeera on April 29).

“Egypt is charting a new course in its foreign policy
that has already begun shaking up the established order in the Middle East,
planning to open the blockaded border with Gaza and normalizing relations with
two of Israel and the Wes’s Islamist foes, Hamas and Iran,” wrote David D.
Kirkpatrick in the New York Times (April 30). Such language was, at one time,
unthinkable. Now, thanks to the will of the Egyptian and Arab peoples, it is
likely to define the new Arab political discourse. Not even a fiery speech by a
discredited Israeli Prime Minister could prevent this powerful paradigm shift.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an
internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto
Press, London), available on Amazon.com.