Analysis from Israel

David offered a persuasive analysis for why Hamas permitted yesterday’s multipronged terror attack across the Israeli-Egyptian border. But since Hamas rarely needs an excuse to attack Israel, the more interesting question is why Egypt permitted the attack. And “permit” seems to be the operative word: The attack took place in broad daylight right in front of an Egyptian army outpost (thus surprising Israel despite intelligence warnings, as it expected the attack to hit an unguarded part of the border), and even when the ensuing firefight moved into Egyptian territory, Israeli news reports offer no indication that Israeli forces ever saw any Egyptian troops in action; they merely note that Egypt later claimed its soldiers had killed two terrorists.

One possible answer, of course, is simple incompetence, which is worrying enough: If Egypt can’t maintain security in Sinai, Israel will have to vastly increase its own troop presence along the border. A more worrying possibility is that the new government, beset by growing domestic unrest, has decided to distract its citizens’ attention by permitting anti-Israel terror from Sinai – which would presumably be popular, given Egyptians’ widespread loathing for Israel (around 90% consistently view Israel as an “enemy” or a “threat”). But there’s a third, equally worrying possibility: This is a deliberate Egyptian tactic aimed at pressuring Israel to annul the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty’s central provision — the demilitarization of Sinai.

Back in March, I noted that Egypt’s opposition was virtually unanimous in wanting to renegotiate the treaty (unsurprisingly, given that 54% of Egyptians want it scrapped entirely), and especially the demilitarization provision. Since then, Cairo has successfully gotten Israel to do exactly that, negotiating two agreements to let in more troops.

The first increase occurred after three attacks (one unsuccessful) closed the Egyptian-Israeli natural gas pipeline for weeks on end between February and May, leaving Israel without gas. At that point, Cairo claimed it couldn’t protect the pipeline with existing troop levels. And even though Hosni Mubarak’s regime had managed to do so — not a single attack disrupted the supply from 2008-2011 — Israel acquiesced, allowing Egypt to station additional forces in Sinai.

But despite the additional forces, two more successful attacks occurred in July. So Cairo again demanded more troops, saying they were necessary to protect the pipeline. And Israel again acquiesced: Just last week, it let Egypt send 2,000 additional soldiers into Sinai, accompanied by tanks.

Now, yesterday’s attack gives Cairo the perfect excuse to demand even more troops: Without additional forces, it will claim, it can’t protect the border (never mind that Mubarak did it successfully for decades). And Israel may well acquiesce once again; deeming more Egyptian troops preferable to having to increase its own troop levels along the border.

This process could repeat itself ad nauseam. And unless Israel halts it, the result will be the erosion of the peace treaty’s greatest achievement, the demilitarization of Sinai. That would leave Israel right back where it was in 1967: facing military annihilation at any moment from an army much bigger than its own.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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