September arrives early

September has already arrived. At 12:04 p.m. Thursday, when the first shot sounded near the Netafim border crossing between Israel and Egypt, 12 kilometers north of Eilat, the problematic month of September announced its arrival on our doorstep, a little early.

Israel is expected to be verbally attacked at the U.N. Security Council in New York next month. But in the here and now, Israel is already being subjected to a series of grave and violent physical attacks.

There is a cost to the revolution in Tahrir Square, and on Thursday Israel was the first to pay it. The violent terror attack in the South is the first repercussion of the Egyptian revolution for Israel. There are some who see positive signs in the “Arab Spring.” They claim that it will bring democracy to Cairo and other places. Yet, in the meantime, it has only brought about the disintegration of Egyptian sovereignty in the Sinai Peninsula. When the weakness in Egypt allowed for the gas pipeline delivering our gas to be hit (five explosions in five months), we felt it in our pocketbooks. On Thursday, Cairo's weakness in Sinai cost us in human life.

Since Mubarak's demise, the Sinai Peninsula has turned into the “Wild East” in Egypt, with armed gangs even overrunning Egyptian police stations. To our great sorrow, the people in Gaza know how to take advantage of opportunities to perpetrate terror. The Bedouin also know how to take advantage of opportunities. Weapons smuggling is a profitable business; much more so than helping smuggle immigrants from Sudan and Eritrea to the border with Israel.

Cooperation between Israel and Egypt on security issues must continue -- and must be efficient -- as if the revolutionary events in Tahrir Square did not change anything. We have to not only talk, but also prepare. Mubarak is being displayed to the world in a cage, from which he can no longer enforce an arms embargo on Hamas. Sinai has turned into fertile ground for Islamic terrorist organizations.

Every time the holidays roll around, we are alerted to possible terror attacks and are subjected to advisories warning us against travel to the Sinai. Suddenly we discover that 20 terrorists can wander around southern Israel as they please, in full daylight, for the purpose of killing, as if we were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. We can already start worrying about the next attack, seeing as the security barrier has not been completed and the leadership has changed in Egypt.

These past few weeks, we have been so excited to be able to demonstrate like other nations. We finally got around to confronting our economic problems, and we even had the luxury of starting to think about existential issues. Suddenly, terror returns, and brings us back to our depressing reality, which raises real questions about our very “existence.”

Those who said that Tahrir Square would reach Israel were not wrong. Unfortunately, it did not arrive in the way many of us had hoped it would.

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