Stakes also high for Egypt at mideast summit, analysts say

CAIRO: Egypt expects Israel to make generous gestures to bolster Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas at Monday s summit in Sharm El-Sheikh in order to further isolate the Islamist Hamas, analysts said. Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians have agreed to attend the four-way summit at the Red Sea resort after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip last week and ejected followers of Abbas s Fatah. And the stakes are high for host Egypt, which has already clearly sided with Fatah and faces its own well-organized Islamist opposition in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. As independents, they now control a fifth of parliament. Egypt also has the only international border with the Gaza Strip at Rafah in the northeast of the country, and the potential for unrest spilling over is clear. The situation for Egypt is formidable and complex: without a breakthrough in the peace process, chaos is on its doorstep, said Emad Gad, a researcher at the Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies. According to Gad, President Hosni Mubarak may be happy about Hamas s isolation but is also very worried the situation could become a security disaster [with] the risk of an Islamist infection and influx of Palestinians into Egypt. Fellow researcher Amr Chubaki, also from the Al-Ahram Center, said Egypt wants to get Israel to make significant and concrete gestures in order to give Abbas s West Bank model a chance of success. Such measures include unblocking hundreds of millions of dollars in customs levies that Israel has withheld since Hamas came to power in March 2006, freeing Palestinian prisoners or easing road blocks in the occupied West Bank. However, for Mustafa Kamel Al-Sayyed, a lecturer at the American University in Cairo, whatever Egypt does, I don t think Israel will make real concessions to relaunch the peace process. He says the best way of reducing Hamas s influence is to reduce the perceived corruption that helped the austere Islamists win their landslide victory against Fatah in parliamentary elections last year. You have to first put pressure on Israel but also on Fatah in order to end the corruption that made it easy for Hamas to win, said Sayyed. If Abbas manages to end the corruption and mafias, the isolation of Hamas, which is going to present an image of probity and Islamic rigor, might be worth it for the Palestinian people, said Chubaki. And if Fatah is not able to retake control of all the Palestinian territories, then Egypt would much rather see the warring sides reconciled than chaos in its own backyard. As a result, Sayyed predicts that Egypt will eventually carry out a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation mission.