THE Egyptian military have brokered a truce between the militant Palestinian factions in Gaza and the Israeli military, which had been bombing Gaza for four days killing 30 people and wounding 80.
The Israelis were in fact keen to get a ceasefire and also agreed ‘to stop assassinations’ and ‘to begin a comprehensive and mutual calm’.
‘There is an understanding,’ Israeli Civil Defence Minister Matan Vilnai told Israel Radio. ‘At the moment the direction is toward calm and it appears, unless there are last minute developments, that this round is now behind us.’
The four days of cross-border violence was triggered by an Israeli air strike on Friday that killed a senior leader of the militant group, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC).
Militants in Gaza responded quickly by unleashing a barrage of rockets towards southern Israel, triggering further air strikes. Eight Israelis were injured by the rockets, dozens of which were shot down harmlessly by Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile interceptor system. There were no Israeli deaths.
Gaza’s Hamas Islamist leadership kept out of the fighting.
In Israel there was little public enthusiasm for waging a longer military campaign along the lines of the 2008-2009 Cast Lead offensive in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. This is despite all of the Israeli army bragging that they were on the brink of an operation that would be much bigger and more powerful than the Cast Lead attack.
The four days of bombings took place in a situation where the entire region, from North Africa to the Middle East, is a cauldron of revolution.
The Egyptian military, whose figurehead Mubarak was overthrown in a workers-led revolution, is still managing to hang onto power in Egypt, with its political front being the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptian working class is not accepting this situation and is continuing with its revolution to achieve full trade union and political rights. These can only be achieved in a workers republic.
The Egyptian military is riding a tiger at home, while east of the Suez Canal, the pipeline from the Sinai to Israel and Jordan has been blown up 16 times by revolutionary forces.
The Egyptian military wants to keep Gaza quiet. It does not want the revolutionary uprising spreading from Morocco and Tunisia through Egypt to Palestine and Iraq. Along with the US, the Egyptian military wants to quickly push the Palestinians into a deal with Israel.
However, as in Egypt, new revolutionary forces are coming to the fore in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hamas, which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, has shifted away from Damascus to Cairo, to the point where its cadres in Syria have accused its leaders of sacrificing the Palestinian masses in Syria to satisfy the interests of the Qatari monarchy and the United States (see page 5).
Meanwhile, the Zionist leadership in Israel is watching the events in Egypt and the development of the Arab revolution with extreme alarm.
The Zionists say quite openly that it is the ‘Arab street’ that is now calling the tune, and, when asked where it will all end, they reply that they do not know, except that it is like a tsunami that can suddenly sweep everything away. They have got the message.
What is really required is the building of the Fourth International throughout the Middle East and north Africa to lead the tsunami of revolution to sweep away the feudal and the military regimes, to drive NATO and its stooges out of Libya, to defend Syria against imperialist intervention, to establish a Palestinian secular and socialist state where Jews, Arabs and Christians can live side by side, and to abolish the feudal regimes in the Gulf!
