CAIRO - Disappearing into the underground after the brutal Israeli war on Gaza in 2008, Ismael Haniyeh, the prime minister of the ousted Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, popped up all of a sudden in Cairo. Amid the deafening chants of enthusiastic worshippers after Friday's prayers at Al-Azhar Mosque in Islamic Cairo, Haniyeh climbed the podium and resumed Hamas' belligerent rhetoric about the ‘Zionist enemy'. He reiterated Hamas' filibuster that the Palestinian resistance movement would under no circumstances lay its arms down before it had driven the Zionist enemy out of the entire Palestinian land. He said Hamas was sure that it would be victorious at the end of the day and that millions of Palestinian refugees would be invited to return to their homes and land. The agitated Egyptian worshippers at Al-Azhar were reassured that a Hamas-led victory moved closer when Cairo decided to ‘resume its leading and indispensable role in sponsoring the Arab cause in general and the Palestinian issue in particular'. Haniyeh deliberately ignored the fact that Cairo has been committed to a peace treaty with Tel Aviv since 1979. According to the Camp David peace accords, Cairo should not encourage or get involved in any hostile activities against Israel and vice versa. While the desperate efforts to achieve reconciliation amongst the two Palestinian factions appear too difficult to achieve, the Hamas leaders are campaigning for unrealistic results in their confrontation with Israel. Since Hamas launched an armed coup in Gaza against the mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organisation (Fatah) in 2006, Cairo has been desperately trying to reconcile the two Palestinian factions. The floundering peace talks between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo, Doha, Riyadh and Damascus bear striking similarities to the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks – equally held in Cairo, Washington and different European capitals. Fatah demands that Hamas should disarm and end its occupation of the Gaza Strip. Hamas stubbornly refuses, claiming that the PLO's proposals are outrageous and paralysing. More interestingly, negotiators from both camps are discussing a prisoner swap. During its armed rebellion in Gaza, Hamas captured scores of Fatah warriors and held them hostage. Fatah retaliated and did the same in the West Bank. Hamas also killed hundreds of Fatah warriors during its Gaza coup, while Fatah forces killed Hamas soldiers before withdrawing from the area. Both sides reject a compromise to end the hostilities; both insist that the other party should make sacrifices and give in first. On the other hand, the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks show the same intricacies and landmines: the exchange of land, geographical compromises and other concessions, etc. etc. When returning home after the Friday prayers at Al-Azhar, people began to reflect on Haniyeh's speech. They found it absurd that the Hamas leader prematurely declared victory over Israel without announcing a reconciliation with Fatah. The Egyptians also could not resist comparing Haniyeh with the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, who rudely spurned an invitation by then Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat to join direct multi-party peace talks with Israel in the Mena House Hotel in Giza. Arafat called el-Sadat a traitor for seeking peace with the Zionist state “at the expense of the Palestinian people's land and welfare”. Arafat also declared that el-Sadat's blood should be shed to ‘cleanse Arab history and dignity'. But in 1991, Arafat went suspiciously underground in Madrid and held face-to-face peace talks with the Israelis. Two years later, breaking news from Oslo announced that the brave Palestinian leader Arafat had signed a peace accord with his Zionist foes. In addition to his killing globetrotting mania, Arafat was known as a voluble warmonger behind closed doors and in Arab and other capitals. In the same vein, Haniyeh is threatening Israel with dire consequences if it does not withdraw from the entire Palestinian land. Shifting its anti-Israeli rhetoric from Damascus to Cairo, Hamas must have cynical plans as far as Egypt is concerned. Hamas has divorced itself from President Bashar al-Assad's embattled regime, which was, until recently, the movement's staunchest supporter against Israel. The departure of Hamas from Damascus occurred when it became pretty clear that the Syrian army had been weakened and divided – which was in Israel's favour. On the other hand, the Egyptian military has repeatedly foiled many local and foreign conspiracies to divide the army and the nation. Egypt should carefully weigh up and examine Hamas' decision to move to Cairo and broadcast its warlike statements from here.
