President George W. Bush in his latest State of the Union speech voiced the certainly admirable sentiment of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement that would eventually see two peaceful, prosperous and democratic states -- one Israeli and the other Palestinian -- living side by side.
But while Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have been focusing their diplomacy on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas have been making a mockery of their efforts.
The Israeli town of Sderot was already being bombarded by low tech Qassam rockets from Gaza throughout the second Palestinian intifada. The rate of bombardment has significantly intensified since Hamas took full control of Gaza and it never lets up. Now, Israeli press reports are talking ominously about the need to take military action against Gaza to stop the bombardments once and for all.
Also, Hamas acted boldly and took the United States and Israel both totally by surprise when they smashed down the ground fortifications cutting Gaza off from Egypt. The strategic implications of that move still seem to be little understood in Washington or even Tel Aviv, which is right next door to Gaza. But they are profound.
First, as we have previously noted in these columns, there is now nothing to stop Palestinians en masse organized from Hamas from crossing into the Negev Desert over the Israeli-Egyptian frontier. They would thereby create a far more serious border and security control problem for Israel than any the Israelis have seen in that region since before the 1967 Six Day War.
Second, the government of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt already must take into account the greatly increased political influence of its own Islamist forces expressed through the gains made by the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan a couple of years ago in the most recent Egyptian parliamentary elections. The prospect of having Hamas able to send as many of its cadres and supporters into Egypt as it wants through a wide-open border is bound to force Cairo into being far more passively supportive of Hamas. It may even lead to greatly increased Hamas-Egyptian military cooperation. That is a scenario that U.S. military planner in the Pentagon and Israeli ones in the Kirya in Tel Aviv have never before seriously contemplated. They may need to start doing so soon.
The complacent policy of President Bush and of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Hamas in Gaza could be strategically isolated from the West Bank and from the rest of the Middle East and simply be "starved out" has now been exposed as wishful thinking. On the contrast, it is Israel, faced with the continuing Qassam bombardments in Sderot and with the looming prospect of an unanticipated major deterioration in its security environment in Negev south of Gaza, that is now racing against time. Hamas is ahead of the game and once again it is calling the shots.