Hezbollah is in the Game?

From AP:

The rockets from Lebanon raised the specter of renewed hostilities on Israel's northern frontier, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the Hezbollah guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. War broke out between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 as Israel battled Palestinian militants in Gaza, on Israel's southern borders.

No group claimed responsibility. Lebanon's government condemned the attack, and Hezbollah — which now plays an integral role in Lebanon's government — denied any responsibility for the rocket fire, which lightly injured two Israelis.

If Hezbollah can't be scared back into sitting on its hands in Parliament, then Egypt and Jordan have problems -- as neighbors to the Palestinians with a long history of screwing the Palestinians who are not currently in the game -- Egypt in the near term, Jordan at one remove.

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son. If Hezbollah distract the IDF enough to take the heat off Gaza (witness 2006, where the Gaza tit-for-tat was occluded by war in the north) Mubarak could be weakened enough to allow slightly more free elections. That's the foot in the door for the MB, and Egypt's days as a tidy little dictatorship are done.

Jordan will have a problem first when refugees from this conflict end up in the West Bank, and start reminding people of how the Palestinians got screwed by their brether'n and sister'n across the River. Jordan will have another problem later when Israel starts to move settlers to a more-easily-managed version of the 1967 border and slowly prepares an assault on the West Bank. Expect a restless West Bank for the three years before Israel declares "all-out war" on all Palestinians, a timeframe I'm thinking will be mid-2010 to end of 2013, during which period expect multiple suicide attacks in Amman, and a spectacular bombing of the Port of Haifa.

On 27 December, ds wrote:

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah.

which, you know, we think of here as an obvious conclusion. When the balloon goes up, etc. But, you know, not everyone sees things this way. Today the NYT lede is "Hezbollah is not a problem; peace is being brokered in Cairo; we're done here." The same article contains the terms of this miraculous peace:

The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.

Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.

Clearly, I jumped the gun on calling the end of NYT's wishful thinking. This shit is candyass.

To translate: first, walking out of Cairo with a real truce is not important, because Israel can always draw up "tacit agreements" with Hamas. Please provide examples of such. Second, this truce must contain a hermetically sealed Egypt-Gaza border AND an open Rafah crossing. That's not some merely onerous diplomatic task; it's an antinomy.

These discussions are a joke. Mubarak will realize this soon enough. The only question I have is, Does anyone in the Arab world have the balls to open Rafah?
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ds