The scorpions sting – again

By SARAH HONIG:

Conventional wisdom contends that neither Gaza nor Cairo harbors much interest in fanning terrorist flames and disrupting the uneasy truce that has precariously prevailed since Operation Cast Lead. Egypt, an unsteady step away from uncontainable internal chaos, prodigiously presents Cairo’s caretaker military junta with other preoccupations. Simultaneously Hamas surely doesn’t relish another punishment of the magnitude inflicted upon it in 2008.

This makes ample sense – on our wavelength. Cerebral processes in the Arab realm, however, don’t necessarily conform to our rationale. They practically never do.

Israelis shocked by last week’s roadside massacre outside Eilat and by the ensuing rocket barrages from Hamastan fall prey to excessively non-Levantine logical assumptions. They fail to understand that our concepts of levelheadedness don’t apply in neighboring latifundia.

Nobody has any business being the least bit taken aback. Porous borders that allow African economic migrants to infiltrate illegally, and drugs to be smuggled routinely, also invite enemy attacks. The Egyptians were never motivated to guard the frontier and are far less so now, as the repeated explosions on the gas pipeline to Israel attest.

Neither the Egyptians nor the Gazans have changed. They only occasionally resort to expedient chatter in the Western idiom, which suffices to make them sound trustworthy – as trustworthy as the scorpion in the fable attributed to old Aesop.

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