11 April 2012. PenzaNews. Resumed in March 2012 fighting between Palestinian militants and Israel once again demonstrated the instability of the situation in the region. Zoheir al-Qaisi — the Gaza-based Secretary General of the militant Palestinian group, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) was killed in an airstrike of the Israeli Air Force. He had been the group’s top leader since last August when its previous Secretary General also perished at Israeli hands. Al-Qaisi’s assassination set off a by now familiar chain of events in which Palestinian militant groups in Gaza retaliated against Israeli targets with rockets and mortars while Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza’s population. As a result, at least 80 Palestinians were injured, 25 — killed; in Israel only 8 foreign workers suffered.

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The violence raged for four days until an Egyptian-brokered truce finally took hold, more or less reinstating the normally abnormal state of tensions along Gaza’s border with Israel. It was a role to which Cairo has become accustomed to playing since the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in 1993. And this time Egypt, attempting to mediate a truce, faced number of difficulties. According to Dan Tschirgi, professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, this new complexity was borne out of four interrelated factors.

The first and most obvious factor, according to the analyst, was the changes Egypt’s own revolution brought about, for instance, the upsurge of extreme nationalistic sentiments that seemed to affect virtually the country’s entire population in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s downfall. This nationalistic sentiment had already been on display last September when a youthful mob overran the Israeli Embassy in Cairo.

Another complicating factor, from his point of view, was the larger regional impact of the Arab Spring movement that gave birth to revolution in several countries apart from Syria.

“Syria had already become the pivotal point of this movement by the time Israeli-Palestinian violence broke out in March. The international community had failed to find an effective way to deal with the Assad regime’s already yearlong violent crackdown on the growing popular opposition to its rule,” Dan Tschirgi said.

Moreover, he reminded that the United Nations had been rendered impotent by the Security Council, which was divided between those countries favoring strong actions against the Assad’s regime on the one hand, and Russia and China who employed their vetoes to prevent any such action from taking place on the other.

“The resulting international paralysis inevitably heightened the importance regional actors placed on attempts to cope with the March Gaza-Israel crisis. This, in turn, firmly linked Iran – and with it, the ongoing international tensions that spring from the Iranian regime’s generally anti-Western stance – to the violent confrontation between Israel and Gaza’s Palestinians,” the expert stated.

In this regard, professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo identified one more factor of the crisis’s threatening architecture — the technological.

“One aspect of this was the Iranian nuclear question, which, although a constant cause of concern over the past decade, had taken on a new urgency by late 2011 because of persistent rumors that Israel, possibly with U.S. support, was planning a military strike against the Islamic Republic. The second technological aspect of the situation unfolding in Gaza was Israel’s very successful new aerial defense system, the so-called “Iron Dome,” the analyst said and added that, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Iron Dome shot down over 90% of the rockets Palestinian militants fired at population centers during the first few days of the March crisis.

In his opinion, the reality is hardly conveyed by the analytical description just recited. For the fact was that the various elements of the March crisis in Gaza interacted in ways lending a remarkable unity to the whole situation. For descriptive purposes, one might reduce the crisis to its component parts, but one should not lose sight their interrelations.

“In this sense, the image that perhaps best captures the recent Gaza flare-up is that of those cute and clever Russian Matryoshka Dolls, the ones of decreasing size that are placed one inside the other. Neither clever nor at all cute, the multilayered and highly integrated structure of March’s Gaza eruption marked a distinctly malignant and dangerous feature of current Middle East politics. It also provided grounds for what many observers of the region have long been sensing: that the underlying dynamics of the Palestine issue are progressively pushing the area toward a major conflagration from which none of the sides can possibly benefit,” the professor noted.

According to his words, this time regional actors had sufficient sense to drawback from the brink of war before it was too late. By the fourth day of clashes, the New York Times was able to report that, “there was no sign that either Israel or Hamas…wanted an all-out confrontation.”

“As March drew to a close, Cairo had the satisfaction of seeing the success of its latest effort to mediate a more or less reasonable outcome to the most recent outbreak of violence between the Israelis and Palestinians. This satisfaction, however, was no doubt tempered by the reality its ability to secure this outcome was almost entirely due to the conflicting parties’ unwillingness to sustain the confrontation,” Dan Tschirgi declared.

He also suggested that by April, Egyptians were turning their collective attention to Cairo’s upcoming presidential elections, currently scheduled for late May. The Muslim Brotherhood, having emerged as the clear winner of earlier parliamentary elections, and now suddenly deciding to field a candidate for the presidency, sent a delegation to Washington in allay U.S. concerns over the prospect of Islamist government in Cairo.

“The delegation carried a powerful argument in support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “reasonableness”: the organization’s decision last Month to withdraw its support to Hamas’ commitment to armed struggle against Israel. Instead, the Brotherhood would henceforth focus on reconciling the two wings of Palestinian nationalism — Hamas, in Gaza, and El Fatah in the West Bank,” the expert noted.

Dan Tschirgi also emphasized that the Brotherhood’s delegation hoped to convince U.S. policymakers that Egypt, under its direction, would expand its mediation efforts in the Middle East to include not only conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis, but also the Palestinians of different political stripes which “was a bold proposal.”

“There is virtually no hope that the Palestine issue will become less complex in the future. On the contrary, the issue will likely become more complex and, consequently, addressing it will become even more difficult. If Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood remains firm in its new position, the United States should accept it as a partner. This would merely reaffirm Washington’s own long-standing declared commitment to a two-state solution. In turn, this would necessarily require Washington distancing itself from the clearly expansionist tendencies of Israel’s current government,” Dan Tschirgi said.

Any other course of action, according to the expert, seems almost certain to force the world to confront another round of the politically ominous Matryoshka Doll syndrome in the Middle East.

“Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect that the next time the same rational calculations, good sense, or just plain good luck will prevail against the possible alternative combination of miscalculation, unbridled ambition, and ideological idiocy,” he concluded.

Dan Tschirgi is Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo. He has lived and worked most of his adult life in the Middle East. Dan Tschirgi is the author or editor of ten books on the region as well as numerous articles, monographs and solicited chapters. His latest books are Turning Point: The Arab World’s Marginalization and International Security After 9/11 (2007) and The Origins of US Involvement in the Modern Middle East Problem (2009).