Israelis were shocked by the attacks in Sinai but have yet to digest their true meaning, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem The scenes were familiar -- the collapsed front of a building, the wounded ferried out on stretchers, the dazed and bloodied confusion of the survivors. The location was not -- for this was not Gaza or Baghdad. It was Egypt. The triple bomb attacks in Sinai on 7 October shocked Israelis. This was not because of the Israeli toll (13 out of 34 fatalities). Israelis have suffered worse, for instance, at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002 when 29 civilians were killed by a Hamas suicide bomber. Nor were they unexpected. In the run up to the Jewish Succot holidays -- when thousands of Israeli tourists annually descend on Taba and the other resorts -- Israeli intelligence had issued four warnings on "highly specific" threats of attack in the Sinai. The shock was rather to do with the place. For the last three years Israelis had seen Sinai as perhaps the only locale in the Arab world where they could feel safe, an oasis in a desert of unremitting hostility. On 7 October the oasis was shown to be a mirage, and a terrible portent of what could be the next phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israeli suspicions initially rested on the Palestinians. The previous ten days had witnessed the Israeli army kill 110 Palestinians and wound 400 in Gaza. Among the dead were perhaps dozens of Hamas men, fuelling an incendiary desire for revenge. There had also been calls among some in Hamas to "shift the struggle overseas" following Israel's assassination of a Hamas leader in Damascus on 26 September. But the Israeli conviction soon hardened that Taba and the other blasts were not the work of Hamas, and not just because of the denial issued by the group. Rather they were more likely the work of a foreign or indigenous Egyptian group inspired by Al-Qaeda, said Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. "Whoever is trying to connect the Palestinians to this is simplifying his life," he told Israel's Channel 1 news on 7 October. "Our reports show that the type of attack, the fact that it was done in multiple locations, with a large amount of explosives ... point more to the direction of Al-Qaeda. The attempt to move to the Palestinian side is wrong." But what was equally wrong was Shalom's failure to draw the obvious conclusion from his appraisal: that while a Palestinian faction was not behind the attacks, Palestinians might have been or very soon could be as a result of his government's policies in the occupied territories and their convergence with those forces in the region whose agenda is not national or national-religious but Jihadist and global. Earlier this month Ayman Al-Zawahiri -- once the leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, now second in command to Osama Bin Laden -- invoked Palestine. He urged his followers to attack those countries that give "means of survival" to Israel, a clear reference to Egypt that has diplomatic and security relations with the Jewish state. In the aftermath of the attacks three Islamist groups (the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, the World Islamic Group and Unity of God Brigades) took responsibility, claiming revenge for Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin or for the "martyrs who fell in Iraq and Palestine". On 11 October the Abdullah Azzam Brigades issued a second statement, warning of attacks on Israel's embassies in Cairo and Amman should Israeli military and intelligence personnel remain in Sinai. Azzam was a Palestinian from Jenin, one of the founders of the Islamist resistance in Afghanistan and killed (perhaps by Bin Laden) in Pakistan in 1980. The Brigades have no known cadres in either Egypt or the occupied territories. But none but the blind could doubt the ground is becoming fertile for just such an allegiance. In September the Israeli army lifted a gag order on the arrest of six Egyptian students who last year tried to organise an attack in Israel. Their affiliation was Islamist, said the army, and their motivation was to avenge "the killing of Palestinian children". Last month there were Israeli reports of a gun battle between Egyptian police and eight Hamas fighters on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border. Their aim, said Israeli press reports, was to mount an attack on Israeli tourists in Sinai. They were made to surrender to the Egyptians following the intervention of the Hamas leadership. On 10 October, writing in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, Israeli columnist Uzi Benziman said "it is in Israel's interest to distinguish as much as possible between Islamist terrorists and Palestinian terrorist groups." Benziman draws back from delineating that distinction but the meaning is clear, including to many Israelis. While Hamas and Islamic Jihad use "terror" as part of their arsenal, they remain national-religious movements struggling against Israel with "boundaries of battle" that have so far remained confined to Israel and the occupied territories. Even at the height of Israel's latest carnage in Gaza, Hamas political leaders like Ismail Haniyyeh were making it clear that mortars fired on Israeli towns were in response to Israel's assassinations and incursions and would halt when they did. For Al-Qaeda -- and its offshoots -- there are no "boundaries of battle", no ceasefires, because theirs is a war not over territory but between civilisations, between an invented "Islam" and an invented "West". For them Palestine is not a land but a religious duty. But a religious war is where Sharon is taking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For him -- as for the present US administration -- "Islamic terrorism is indivisible", whether it is fought by Hamas in Gaza or whoever in Sinai. Sharon "understood that Palestinian terrorism is in part not national, but religious. Therefore, granting national satisfaction [to the Palestinians] will not solve the problem of this terrorism," Sharon's bureau chief, Dov Weisglass, told Haaretz on 8 October. There can be no more dangerous equation. For it is still possible to divide the nationalist violence of the Palestinians in the occupied territories from that visited on Sinai. The real threat -- to Israel no less than its neighbours -- is when it comes indivisible, when Al-Qaeda and Hamas become one and cross that final border from Taba to Israel, and Palestine evolves from a national conflict that is resolvable to a civilisational one that is not. No politician has sown that equation more assiduously than Sharon. In TabaIsraelis, Egyptians and others reaped the first of its harvest.
