This blog has often commented in posts such as these [
1,
2] throughout Israel's Operation Cast Lead about the continuing flow of arms into Gaza, arms smuggling and Egyptian myths regarding its "best efforts."
Now, Israel's former national security advisor Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland provides authoritative
confirmation that Egypt has, and will continue, to allow smuggling into Gaza in this Q and A session with The Jerusalem Post:
Overall, where do you consider that Israel succeeded, and where did it fail, in Operation Cast Lead?
The most important success is that the operation will produce quiet for a long time in the South.
Israel's deterrence has been reasserted.
Hamas has suffered a blow to its legitimacy in Gaza. Outside help is required to provide economic assistance to the people there. Hamas has had to make commitments to Egypt, and any breach of those commitments will bring it trouble with Egypt and with others.
The IDF was successful, the public has been reassured, the home front functioned well.
What about the issue of arms smuggling into Gaza?
That's much more more problematic.
To be polite, the Egyptians are telling us stories and we are deluding ourselves.
Egypt was not effective in the past. It doesn't care about weapons in Gaza.
The smuggling tunnel apparatus also features drugs and televisions and mobile phones, and keeps whole tribes in business. So either Egypt has to truly confront this whole industry or pay off the smugglers. And I'm not sure it's going to do that.
As for the dramatic signing of an agreement between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the previous secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, intended to stop the smuggling, well, without being rude, it's not serious and it's not significant.
The United States has had a profound interest in stopping arms smuggling between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and from Iran to Iraq. But it hasn't been able to. So preventing a flow of weapons from, say, Somalia to Sudan to Egypt and then to Gaza? No, it's not going to happen.
The only truly effective way to prevent the smuggling would be for the Egyptians to build a buffer zone five kilometers from the border, fence it off, and control the only road through the sand. But they won't do that.
