Netanyahu has not missed an occasion, over the past few months, to announce that he was on the verge of bombing Iran. He blackmailed the Americans, and Obama in particular, to the utmost extent on the eve of the presidential elections, in hopes of obtaining Washington's support to carry out his threats, but he failed to convince them. He allied himself with right-wing candidate Mitt Romney. He wagered on the latter's victory and on change in the White House that would allow him more freedom of movement in the Middle East, which is witnessing key historical changes, in hopes of further contributing to drafting the new political maps, and of renewing Israel's role as the sole ally of the United States and the West, now that there are those who would compete against it for such a role, especially in the age of Neo-Ottomanism and its Arab and Islamic branches. Netanyahu's American wagers have failed, stripping him bare in the face of Israeli public opinion. It was thus imperative for him to activate the war machine so that it may rescue him and help him to save face. Yet he was confronted by his inability to carry out his own threats of bombing Iran, without political and military support from the United States. Indeed, Obama's considerations as he returns to the White House are different from Netanyahu's. The latter therefore had no choice but to attack Gaza, considering Hamas to represent one of Iran's weaker arms, and doing away with a truce which Egypt had played a major role in ratifying, especially as the Hamas leadership has left Syria and has gradually begun to distance itself from Tehran. It is a truce which the Muslim Brotherhood's Cairo had sought after in order to give itself some time to formulate its policy on Palestine, the features of which seem different from the ideas put forward by the Brotherhood before coming to power. Netanyahu has placed the Egyptian government before an extremely difficult test: meeting popular demands to annul the Camp David Accords and sever relations with Israel would place it in a confrontation with the United States, which did not hesitate for a second to support the Israeli assault on Gaza, and ignoring those demands would force it to confront the street, which has several times expressed its dissatisfaction with this government's domestic policy. And what is the fact that Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil resorted to visiting Gaza and that Israel announced suspending its operations on this occasion but another attempt to restore the truce? Certainly Netanyahu will lay down many conditions before agreeing to it, among them Cairo's participation in monitoring the influx of weapons into the Gaza Strip, especially as resistance missiles manufactured in Iran have reached Tel Aviv for the first time in the history of the Hebrew State. It must in this case pressure Hamas, which had previously received many promises, from Europeans and from Arabs, of its rule of the Gaza Strip being consecrated, of a great deal of financial support and of border crossings being opened, until the Israeli assault came to dispel all of those promises and bring the Hamas movement back to reality. Such a reality confirms day after day that the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere is not tantamount to a magic wand, and that it will continue to follow the policies of former regimes, because they are tied to many foreign “commitments" and because “the faithful do not betray vows". Netanyahu has replaced the attack on Iran with an attack on Gaza, turning the dream of the new Egyptian regime into a nightmare.
