As the investigation continues, Egypt slowly comes to terms with the meaning of the Sinai bombings. Amira Howeidy reports from Taba The big yellow Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer moved back and forth through the rubble of the Hilton Taba as the warm Sinai sun prepared to set, tinting the perfect blue sky gold and orange. The sheer rock faces of the surrounding mountains and the turquoise depths of the Red Sea persevered in their usual, eternal serenity. Yet even their beauty could not conceal or distract from the ugly scars left by the events of the night before. On 8 October, 10pm local time, a vehicle packed with 600kg of advanced explosives was detonated into the foyer of the Hilton Taba. Half an hour later, consecutive blasts wreaked mayhem on two tourist camps frequented largely by Israelis in Nuweiba, 60km to the south. Thirty-four people were killed: ten Egyptians, 13 Israelis. The other victims included two Italians, several Russians and several who have not yet been identified. Some 159 people, mostly Israelis, were also injured. Both countries awoke the next day in a state of shock. Even before the dust from the explosions had settled, it was immediately clear that a new dynamic had emerged in the region, and one that is almost certainly being driven by the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict. While Israel instantly accused Al-Qaeda of what it described as global "jihad terror", it seemed most logical for many here to see the bombings which specifically targeted a tourist destination popular with Israelis as a reaction to daily Israeli terror against the Palestinian people. According to official figures released following the bombing, 15,000 Israeli tourists were in Sinai at that moment, despite warnings of a possible security threat issued by the Israeli government. Egyptians were surprised to discover that in the course of this year alone, 300,000 Israelis have vacationed in the Sinai, arriving via the Eilat crossing, which is within walking distance of the Hilton Taba. Indeed, if they are drawn to Sinai in such numbers, it is precisely because it represents for them a peaceful and idyllic haven, in contrast to the war zone in which they live back home. Yet even though this week's attack could have been seen coming, it still managed to take everyone by surprise. For more than two weeks now, Israel has been pursuing an aggressive military incursion, Operation Days of Penitance, in Northern Gaza. To date, the Israeli army has killed 116 Palestinians according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, and injured 400 more, most of them civilians and children. In addition, Israel recently took the conflict beyond its own borders when it assassinated a senior Hamas political figure in Damascus two weeks ago. And these are just some recent examples of an especially violent state policy adopted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with the aim of liquidating the Islamic resistance movements based in Gaza before Israel's postulated withdrawal from the strip in 2005. In the course of carrying out this strategy, the Israeli security forces had already assassinated the founder of Hamas and the movement's second-in-command earlier this year, while a massive military incursion into Rafah, close to the Egyptian border, demolished dozens of houses and left the town virtually destroyed. In the past four years alone, Israel has killed over 3,000 Palestinians, most of whom were not involved in resistance activity. Despite the fact that there are still no leads as to who was behind the Sinai bombings, the US, following Israel's suit, is refusing to link the bombings with the explosive situation just across the border. On Tuesday, US Vice President Dick Cheney said that the Sinai bombing "looks like it probably was an Al- Qaeda attack". But Egypt, which has a long and painful experience of Islamist militancy, is dissatisfied with this "hasty" assessment. Speaking from Rome on Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak maintained it was still too early to tell who was responsible for the bombings, thus reiterating the point made on Monday, in his first press conference since the blasts, by the Public Prosecutor. Police sources said on Tuesday that they are currently searching for the four men they believe were driving the three vehicles involved in the bombings. The sources said that all three vehicles came from inside Egypt. Contrary to initial scenarios, mostly emanating from Israel, no suicide bombers appear to have been involved, and there was no green four-wheel drive Ford car that crashed into the Hilton. According to police sources, a pick-up truck packed with TNT explosives hidden beneath rows of wooden boxes -- possibly vegetable containers -- was parked at the entrance to the Taba Hilton. The two men who had been in the vehicle left it approximately two minutes before it exploded. Meanwhile, the attack on the tourist camp at Ras Shitan, Nuweiba, was carried out using a Peugeot 504 stationwagon, and again the driver parked it and ran away before it exploded. According to the police, the explosives used in the attacks on Ras Shitan and on the other resort are entirely different from the material that was used to bomb the Hilton. "This material is highly explosive, has a huge destructive effect, and is very uncommon in Egypt," the source said. While the ongoing investigations will be of vital importance to expose the culprits behind these attacks, the political repercussions of the Sinai bombings are likely to prove no less important in the long run. Already, top Egyptian officials have gone on record for the first time conceding that the status of the demilitarised buffer zone (DMZ) in eastern Sinai ought to be reviewed. The 1979 Camp David treaty between Egypt and Israel strictly limits Egyptian forces in area C, which runs along the eastern border of the Sinai and covers approximately one-third of the total area of the peninsula, to a lightly-armed police presence. It was in this buffer zone that the attacks took place. For the first time in 25 years, Egypt has said that it feels it needs to strengthen its military presence on its eastern border. "Had we been able to have the army in Area C," leading presidential adviser Osama El-Baz said, "it would have been easier for us to control entry to the area." Almost immediately following these statements, Israeli sources leaked to the media an official request by Egyptian officials presented to Tel Aviv before the attacks to redeploy Egyptian military forces in Sinai to control arms smuggling across the border. This Egyptian-Israeli security dialogue is in turn part of the intensive talks that have been going on recently over an Egyptian role in Gaza in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. Although Cairo's publicly declared position is that it will not play policeman for Israel in Gaza, many, including the Palestinian factions, are sceptical about this, and openly oppose any level of security arrangement between Egypt and Israel. Israel has dismissed the possibility of Palestinian involvement in the Sinai bombings. Meanwhile, Egyptian investigators reportedly took the issue up with Jihad and Hamas officials, who denied any link with the attacks. Both factions maintain that their struggle against the Israeli occupation will not be extended outside that country's borders. But despite the 25-year-old peace agreement with Israel and the slow and rather embarrassed normalisation of relations, the dynamic between Egypt and Israel has never been more complicated and contradictory than it is today. Indeed, it came as a shock to many otherwise well-informed Egyptians that the volume of Israeli tourism is so high and that the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement allows Israelis to enter Sinai as far as Sharm El-Sheikh for 14 days at a time without a visa. According to Wael Khalil, an activist with the Egyptian Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Intifada (EPCSI), "although Egypt withdrew its ambassador to Israel following the eruption of the Intifada four years ago in protest at Israel's violence, it is still actively pursuing business agreements with Tel Aviv to import gas and establish Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ)." All this is going on, Khalil pointed out, "at a time when the situation on the ground is much worse than it was at any previous point in the Arab-Israeli conflict". Like many Egyptians, Khalil argues that despite the anger he feels towards the people responsible for the Sinai bombings, "most of us understand why the attack happened and make a clear distinction between such an act and global terror -- if indeed there is such a thing." It would take a former official to offer a blunt reading of why the Sinai bombings were just waiting to happen. "What is happening in Palestine definitely has an impact on us," said Major-General Ali Hefzi, former governor of Sinai and former aide to the defence minister. "Anyone who watches the images of Palestinian suffering [on TV] must be affected." The general thinking now appears to emphasise the issue of Egypt's national security vis-�-vis the conflict just across its borders in Israel and the growing chaos that is Iraq. Warnings by officials and pundits that focal points of violence would spread across the region, accelerated by the Anglo- American invasion of Iraq, might now be proving right. While the US and Israel insist that all acts of violence across the region are the doing of only one organisation, Al-Qaeda, many here are tiring of this theory which is simply inadequate to account for the realities on the ground. "The issue is no longer an extremist group targeting the Egyptian government," Hassan Nafaa, a prominent political analyst, told the Weekly. "There is a conflict between Israel and the Arabs, which is still not over. This conflict is obviously quite capable of extending not only to Egypt, but to all the Arab countries which are cooperating with the US and Israel." Tareq El-Bishri, a former judge and renowned historian, puts it more dramatically. "The bombings expose how the relationship between Egypt and Israel affects our national security." The conflict in Israel and the Palestinian resistance to the occupation "inevitably have an affect on Egypt's borders. Every ruler of Egypt throughout the centuries realised that the country's security depends directly on its northern- eastern border, on our relation to the Levant." There is violence in the region, El-Bishri continued, "and we don't know what has been created in the Arab-Muslim womb as a result. We are talking about organisations or groups that have no history with the police or the CIA. Nobody knows who they are, because they are the outcome of occupation, colonialism and excessive violence." Whether or not the issue of the Arab world's sovereignty vis-�- vis Israeli and US hegemony and occupation has actually given birth to new and previously unknown groups, remains to be seen. But the political, geographical and historical significance of the Sinai bombings provide much food for thought on the dynamics of peace and war in the region. Is it just a coincidence that the triple bomb attacks took place in Sinai while Egyptians were still celebrating the 31st anniversary of the 6th of October victory over Israel? As it has every year at this time for the past two decades, state-run TV was airing "Sinai Has Fully Returned to Us" by Egyptian diva Shadia only hours before the first attack. The irony reached its climax when dozens of uniformed Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) crossed the Egyptian border -- to lead the rescue mission -- for perhaps the first time since 1989, when Sinai was completely liberated from Israeli occupation. For the first time since the creation of Israel, the khaki-uniformed IOF personnel found themselves standing on Arab soil, with their cranes, bulldozers and firefighters, on a save-and-rescue mission only. Although their spokesperson described cooperation with the Egyptians as "good", the tension was tangible in the smoke-filled air, as the two "former" enemies were reminded of the roots of their conflict, which unwarranted peace agreements have sought, but failed, to erase. Since the dawn of history, the Sinai Peninsula has been a place of great symbolic significance to all three monotheistic religions. It was here that the Jews wandered for 40 years, and it was here too that Amr Ibn Al-'As passed when he led the Islamic conquest of Egypt in 640 AD. Many centuries later Sinai stood as one of the watersheds in the Arab-Israeli conflict, when Israel occupied it upon defeating Egypt in the 1967 War. It was here that the "fruits" of the subsequent peace agreements were supposed to flourish, most notably tourism projects such as the famous Golden Triangle Red Sea Riviera project between Israel, Jordan and Egypt, that collapsed before it ever materialised. It was here too that certain episodes of the Israeli- Palestinian peace process were pursued and failed. Taba, which overlooks the Gulf of Aqaba and shares water and land borders with Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, once again seems set to symbolise a watershed in the cycle of violence grinding away at the heart of the Arab world.
