Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

President Obama's second meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, scheduled to take place today, presents an opportunity to view this important bilateral relationship from a proper perspective. For too long, U.S.-Egyptian relations have focused, somewhat myopically, on only two things: the state of Egypt's peace with Israel and its progress toward democratization.

Both issues are critical to the Middle East, and for years I have written about the imperatives for a deeper peace and have been critical of the slow pace and the procrastination of Egypt's democratization process. But the two presidents must also focus on the newest threat to the region -- the ubiquity of fragile states that are crumbling under the pressures of demography, resource scarcity and internal strife.

Western analysts understandably have an instinctual suspicion of the all-encompassing power of the "typical" Middle Eastern state. But this view is outdated. The fracturing of state structures has become widespread. Start with the biggest worry -- Pakistan. Its recent efforts to militarily reassert lost state authority over swaths of national territory that had careened out of control have been the subject of discussion, and headlines, around the world. Trouble does not end there. In Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, the cohesion of the state is under assault.

These countries are buckling under the weight of shriveling institutional authority. Laws are not enforced. Economies cannot be regulated. Jobs are not created. Parts of national territory are ceded to non-state actors. Health care, education and basic services don't get delivered. In this context, Egypt stands out. Not only because Egypt is the epicenter of the Arab world; the largest, oldest and most populous Arab country; the first Arab nation to have made peace with Israel; and America's closest ally in the region. Rather, Egypt is increasingly an exception because it is one of the few Middle Eastern countries with strong, evolving institutions able to advance domestic development even while the nation remains the key player for strategic action regionally.

This reality is reflected on two fronts.

First, the Egyptian state has remained stable while accommodating change. The changes are far from sufficient, but society's transformation is indisputable. The monolithic one-party state of a quarter-century is gone. Direct, multicandidate presidential elections have replaced previous presidential referendums. More than 500 newspapers, journals and magazines are published in the country, and Egyptians have access to some 400 Arabic-speaking free-to-air satellite TV channels that compete for news and critical views.

Egypt's reform effort has been especially significant on economic issues. The country was named the top regional reformer in 2009, for the third year in a row, by the World Bank publication Doing Business. Investments have increased significantly, bringing down unemployment from 11.8 percent in 2005 to 8.6 percent last year. Since 2005, the growth rate of Egypt's gross domestic product has outpaced some of the newly industrialized Asian economies. Egypt appears certain to sustain its position as one of the world's rising economies well into the future.

Second, the Egyptian state has kept the peace in a region where everything and everyone seem to push toward war. Its 1979 peace with Israel has held firm and expanded to Jordan, often against difficult odds.

While peace brought criticism from many Arab quarters, Egypt remains the only Arab country all parties look to for strategic consensus and rational thinking. With the region divided among numerous fault lines, Egypt still convenes all groups to dialogue -- the Palestinian factions, Israelis, Sudanese and Iraqis. These parties rarely agree, but all want Egyptian fingers plugging the region's violent dikes. Over decades, Egypt has consolidated its role as the indisputable arbiter of peace.

This only highlights Egypt's centrality as the United States prepares to face the strategic challenges of forging a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement, halting Iran's nuclear program and ensuring Iraq's stability after the U.S. military withdrawal.

Beyond those, the United States and Egypt must contend with the looming prospect of regional state fragmentation.

The Middle East must have a way to deal with the chaos of failed states. Together, the United States and Egypt should seek out a coalition of like-minded regional and international actors to design new mechanisms targeted toward averting collapse in failing nations. Solutions might sometimes be political, and other times they might require financial or managerial intervention. Washington and Cairo must recognize that staving off further state deterioration in the Middle East will require new international and regional solutions and creative statecraft. In this endeavor, Egypt is an ally and an example.

US President Barack Obama's speech at Cairo University triggered a host of repercussions. Perhaps the most salient is that it compelled the Israeli government to declare its position, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did in his speech at Bar-Ilan University on June 14. The Netanyahu speech, in turn, triggered two general responses. Whereas the United States and the European Union welcomed the speech, the Arabs rejected it, with some Arab media insisting it had effectively sounded a death knell for the negotiating process.

The single most important Israeli gain from the speech was the wedge it drove between the US-EU response and the Arab one. The speech was pitched so the US and Europe could pick up on the acknowledgement of the two-state solution, it was tactically useful domestically, and it was a negotiating position that, Netanyahu said, marked a beginning not an end.

Contrary to the general opinion in the Arab world, I believe that we must take Netanyahu at his word and, rather than treating his speech as a final position, look at it as a springboard for attaining the goal of creating an independent Palestinian state, free of settlements, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Anything that conflicts with this aim, such as settlements or the demand to officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state, we should disregard for the time being, though with regard to the latter issue it is vital to insist that Israel guarantee its Arab citizens their full citizenship rights in order to allay the specter of a mass "transfer."

Since the Obama administration has come to power, Washington's attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict has steadily moved closer to that of Europe. Washington has been turning up the pressure on Netanyahu to freeze settlement activity and agree to a two-state solution. When European countries, Russia, China, India and other powers, echoed the call, Netanyahu's government began to fear a resurgence of the type of international isolation it thought had been consigned to the past.

Having correctly gauged the global temperature, Netanyahu, chose not to openly buck the tide. Instead, he hit upon a formula that sounded conciliatory but, in fact, was calculated to dismantle any Arab-Western-global consensus, minimize Israeli losses and buy time.

Netanyahu's speech was designed to send out mixed signals. On the one hand, he nodded in the direction of global opinion, admitting to the need for the creation of a Palestinian state. On the other hand, he refused to declare a complete halt to settlement activity, insisting upon the "right" to continue construction to meet the needs of "natural growth," which has always been the Israeli code for settlement expansion.

Netanyahu then added a long list of demands and conditions regarding the shape and powers of a prospective Palestinian state, topping them off with insistence on a unified Jerusalem and the need for the Palestinians to recognize, in advance, the Jewish character of Israel.

It might be useful, here, to recall the former Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin's positions regarding Israeli settlements, airports and land in the Sinai and then to recall that the Sinai was subsequently returned in full to Egypt. It is also useful to bear in mind that many Third World countries, upon reaching independence, started under conditions of less than full sovereignty which was eventually acquired as circumstances changed.

Those countries that welcomed the speech were taken aback by the hasty Arab reaction which appeared to suppose that Netanyahu had said this is where the process stops, with no prospect for a Palestinian state and no horizon for a freeze on settlements. Arab governments, political movements and the media dismissed the Israeli prime minister's acknowledgement of the need for a Palestinian state as a ruse aimed at impressing Western countries when the real thrust of Israeli strategy is to press ahead with settlement expansion and to force the question of the "Jewishness" of the state as a way of effectively forestalling the resumption of negotiations.

There is some validity to this position. After all, how a state defines itself is really its own concern. We have an Islamic Republic of Iran and other countries that are "Islamic." But never in the history of international relations has a state demanded others recognize its definition of itself above and beyond the recognition of its right to exist.

That Western and Arab states should have taken antithetic views over what is tactical and what is strategic in Netanyahu's speech is precisely what he was aiming for. What seems clear to me is that the Arabs must focus more clearly on their own tactics and strategies, including how the US and Europe fit into them.

By no means is this meant to suggest we agree to Netanyahu's terms. Rather, the point is that we must engage with him as though his speech was no more than a negotiating position staked out by a Likud hardliner whom we must coax step-by-step into being reasonable, as the Egyptians did with Begin.

Such a strategic handling of the Netanyahu speech is far removed from blanket rejection, which serves only to hand Europe and Washington to Israel on a silver platter. Through such a rational strategy of engagement we can build momentum to support the Palestinian cause. Above all, we must remain on guard against behaving in the way Netanyahu is banking on.

The Obama administration has hit the ground running in the Middle East by virtually reversing all the traditional positions of the Bush administration: from neglect to activism, from clash of civilizations to dialogue of civilizations, from believing that the Arab-Israel conflict cannot be resolved to believing that despite difficulties the hope is there.

The early March visit by newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for Middle East peace negotiations, and the granting of $900 million for the Palestinian Authority and Gaza reconstruction all signaled that the United States really means business in the region.

In early March, 71 states and 16 international organizations met in Sharm el-Sheikh to grant $5.2 billion for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for an international conference for the Middle East before the end of the year and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy expressed interest in hosting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Sicily.

Yet it is still early for the Obama team to opt for optimism in the Middle East. The history of failures in the region is not the only justification for caution. The crisis in Gaza is not yet over. The situation along the Gaza-Israel border is still fragile. The negotiations in Cairo aimed at stabilizing the ceasefire and among the Palestinian factions have encountered a variety of obstacles.

Moreover, there are structural problems that are very difficult to resolve. First, the Israeli public elected an extreme right wing majority to the Knesset. Attempts by the United States and other countries to encourage formation of a mainstream Israeli government, even one right of center, have mostly failed. Even though the small Labor party joined the Netanyahu government, the new more right-wing alignment will have neither the intention nor the ability to resume the peace path.

Second, during the past few years the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was undermined by two opposite forces: Hamas and Israel. The former made it impossible for the PA to fulfill its obligations under Palestinian-Israeli agreements to prevent the use of force, whether terrorist or resistance, against Israel. The latter, by building settlements and reoccupying Palestinian territories, made it impossible for the PA to be the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This was one of those ironies of history in which two arch-enemies work in unison to achieve the same strategic goal: in this case, ending the possibility of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli question. What did happen was that the PA failed in substance but was resilient in form. Whether under the leadership of Yasser Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, the PA lost its powers to manage both Palestinian lives and the Palestinian cause. The Israeli propensity for unilateral steps, including building the separation wall, and Hamas' success in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections opened the door for a fundamentally new Palestinian situation that is not ripe for serious negotiations. Even before the new Israeli government has assumed its responsibilities, a project for massive construction of settlements in the West Bank is in place and major de-Palestinization of East Jerusalem is at work. For Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims there is no peace without East Jerusalem as capital of the Palestinian state.

However, the approach of the Obama administration to the Palestinian question is thus far more regional than it is captive of the specificities of the conflict. It is much more important to create an environment conducive to peacemaking and serving American global interests. Promising to visit Ankara to mend fences with the Islamic world, asking for a serious dialogue with Tehran on all issues to give Iran its rightful place under the sun and clearing the air that was polluted by the Bush administration in Cairo and Riyadh are all steps in that direction.

Such an approach will provide incentives for the parties to move in the right direction. Its success or failure remains to be seen. It will be an uphill battle for Obama, but without it all his other objectives in the Middle East will be jeopardized.

The nightmare of politics is when political leaders have to deal with deeply contradictory goals. And when these contradictory goals characterise an environment of armed conflict, "war" for short, the nightmare is at its worst. Nothing represents this nightmare better for Egypt than the Israeli war in Gaza, where contradictory objectives describe both external and internal policy.

Even after excluding ancient historic, geographic and demographic ties, Gaza is strategically linked to Egypt's national security. For better or for worse, Gaza was under Egyptian administration between 1948 and 1967. Never was it contemplated in Cairo to annex the Strip. When the Egyptian-Israeli peace was signed, Gaza remained part of the Palestinian occupied territories, with Rafah as the crossing point between Egypt and Gaza.

Between 1982 and 1994, when the Oslo Accords were signed, not only was the Rafah crossing in use, but also underneath it tunnels were dug, and through them were smuggled drugs, people and arms associated with organised crime and revolutionary sentiment. Israel looked the other way until the second Intifada, when about 30 tunnels became very active in the smuggling of arms. The destruction of some 1,600 houses along the Egyptian-Gazan border did not solve the problem for Israel. In fact, the problem was compounded after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the election of Hamas in 2006 and its takeover of Gaza in June 2007.

Egypt has historic ties with Gaza that it cannot ignore. For better or for worse, if Egypt is historically involved in the Arab-Israel conflict by supporting the Palestinian cause, this is particularly so for Gaza. The geographic link generates risks and challenges for Egyptian security, the safety of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, the economic prosperity of Sinai and, of no less importance, the relationship between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Three additional security risks from Gaza were added in the last few years. The first involved smuggling of arms into Sinai and contributing to the training of terrorists who carried out deadly operations in Taba, Sharm El-Sheikh and Dahab on the Gulf of Aqaba coast. The second was the demographic invasion of Sinai by three quarters of a million Palestinians in January 2008. This alerted Egyptians to the possibility of a Palestinian takeover of Sinai, whether under pressure from Israel or by Hamas planning to create strategic depth for its very small territory. The third, a much more strategic security risk, involves Hamas becoming part of a much larger coalition of radicals that are targeting Egypt for having changed its posture to one of peace and moderation.

This last risk is one of the main features of the present crisis in Gaza. Egypt has been the target of political attacks that even preceded the Hamas decision to end the truce with Israel. These have taken the form of media campaigns by Iranian, Lebanese, Syrian and pro-Hamas Palestinian sources. Ironically, Qatar's famed Al-Jazeera TV channels have led the way in discrediting the Egyptian position regarding management of the Rafah crossing. The media attacks were followed by demonstrations at Egyptian embassies in Tehran and a variety of Arab capitals.

All this took on an even more critical aspect for Egypt when Israel moved militarily into the Gaza Strip. The visit of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to Cairo hours before the attack gave the political offensive additional ammunition, as Egypt appeared to be coordinating its position with Israel.

For Cairo this has become a nightmare. On the one hand, Egypt's historic and geostrategic position creates linkages that Egypt and the Egyptians cannot forget or ignore. Domestic support for these linkages is also not easy to ignore, particularly in view of Egypt's past conflicts with Israel and the latter's apparent military superiority. The human suffering in Gaza, amplified on our TV screens, has frayed nerves in Cairo.

On the other hand, the problems that Egypt faces are Hamas-made, with the purpose of either re-entangling Egypt once more in the Palestinian conflict, or -- reflecting thinking in radical centres in Tehran, Beirut and Gaza -- to change the Egyptian regime. In reality, neither objective is attainable.

Fortunately for Egypt, the situation in Gaza -- where radicalism, religious or nationalist, is mixed with the Palestinian question -- is not entirely new. Cairo was in the same situation when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the US invaded Iraq and Hizbullah went to war with Israel. Each time it was the weight of the Egyptian state that carried the day: to work for a ceasefire, create a new balance that gives all parties breathing space, and finally to delineate a comprehensive solution for the Arab-Israel conflict that dissociates it from diverse forms of radicalism.

The scenario will be no different for Egypt this time. Cairo has the political capacity domestically and externally to sustain an effort to go to the root of the problem. It remains to be seen whether other parties in the region, particularly the Israelis and Palestinians, have the same capacity.