The Wall Falls

You could call it a fall of the Berlin Wall moment in the Middle East. Or at least an echo of one. Effectively caged inside the dense Gaza Strip by Egyptian as well as Israeli security forces along the borders, tens of thousands of Palestinians broke through a security wall and streamed into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday. They were joyful to have the chance to breathe again. Most of them jammed into the markets for a shopping frenzy, loading up on canned food, goats, chickens, cigarettes, chocolate, mattresses and television sets. A few headed for the Mediterranean beaches, even though it's the dead of winter. Their message: We just want to live.

That's as far as the Berlin Wall analogy goes. Back in 1989, the East Germans had been suffocated by a Communist state that walled itself off from the free world for nearly a half century. Gaza has been shut in longer than that, by a more complex set of forces. For decades, its inhabitants suffered under Israel's occupation of the territory. For the past two years, they have struggled under an international embargo that seeks to punish the Islamist Hamas group that won Palestinian legislative elections yet refused to end its war against Israel. Some Gazans blame their Hamas rulers for their predicament, but many of those breaking through the wall on Wednesday cursed external rather than internal hands for their plight: principally Israel, but also the U.S. and Arab governments such as Egypt's.

The fall of this particular wall, which will be temporary, will not cause the collapse of Hamas's control of Gaza. Rather, it is forcing everyone else to reconsider their roles in effectively putting 1.5 million Palestinians into a prison with appalling humanitarian conditions. Israel has participated in the siege of Gaza, seeking to punish Hamas for its rocket attacks on Israeli towns and kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in 2006. Some Israeli officials are hoping that the border opening with Egypt will enable it to sever links to the troublesome territory it occupied for nearly 40 years. But the lack of a political understanding with the Hamas masters of Gaza could mean the existence of a hostile neighbor on Israel's southern border for the indefinite future.

Gaza's breakout handed a more immediate challenge to Egypt, which had led the effort by some Arab parties to squeeze Gaza, and did so for two reasons. The first was to bolster Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who continues to engage in peace negotiations with Israel despite the fact that his Fatah group lost the parliamentary elections to Hamas. The second reason is related to Egypt's desperate effort to block the rise of the Hamas-aligned Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt. If Hamas succeeds in Palestine, the Brotherhood can better hold itself up as a realistic alternative to President Hosni Mubarak's regime. The Hamas-engineered crack in the wall dealt Mubarak an embarrassing blow, further exposing his weakness domestically and as a regional player. Although it might be prudent for Mubarak to work out border arrangements with Hamas and accommodate his domestic Islamist opponents, he will be inclined to do neither.

The fact that the Gazans stampeded out of their confines scarcely a week after President Bush toured the Middle East also underlines the shaky condition of the U.S.-sponsored Annapolis peace process. Bush and Abbas reject any role for Hamas in the negotiations, the former because the group refuses to reject violence and accept Israel, the latter because his political survival is increasingly threatened by Hamas's successes. But the exodus into Egypt demonstrated that the campaign to crush Hamas with political and economic pressure has failed. Even assuming that Annapolis gets anywhere, Hamas is standing by to be the spoiler.

Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere, director, Arab-Israeli Project, International Crisis Group, saw some analogies with the fall of the Berlin Wall as he watched Palestinians pouring into Egypt this week. "There was a quest for freedom, for fresh air," he told me Thursday afternoon in Cairo. "In the pictures of these ordinary people who live in difficult circumstances, you see happiness, almost like a carnival. The wall came down and they went shopping." And the Middle East became an even more complicated place.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo