The Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Security Agency did not just thwart any ordinary terror attack along the southern border on Sunday they prevented a strategic, potentially volatile event that could have pushed Israel into a complex, multi-front confrontation. This attack did not begin with the targeted killing of two Global Jihad members in Gaza on Sunday; in fact the two events may not even be connected. These are two parallel, but separate events two of many that have Gaza or Sinai terrorists on one end and Israeli soldiers or civilians who are kidnapped or killed on the other end. Similar incidents prompted Israel's counterterrorism bureau to issue a severe travel warning urging Israelis to leave Sinai recently and the IDF to maintain a high level of alert along the border with Egypt, for fear of a repeat of last year's attack on Route 12, in which eight Israelis were killed. But despite the high alert level, the IDF was taken by surprise Sunday, not by the attack itself, but by the level of its daring. The attack, which made its way toward us, was huge, bold and more challenging than any we had ever known: the brutal infiltration into an Egyptian army base; the murder of 15 uniformed Egyptian border guards; the commandeering of a military vehicle and the charge toward the border with the aim of killing Israelis. It was only the IDF's rapid response, with the help of the Israel Security Agency, overseen up close by GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Tal Russo, that ended the entire event within 15 minutes, with all the terrorists dead and no casualties or abductions on the Israeli side. And still, the joy of this success is overshadowed by a troubling worry. Sinai has become a lawless land. The strongest dominate and every terrorist is left to his own devices. They are free to transfer ammunition, store it, test it and ultimately use it for terror. These are not your old-school primitive terrorists with AK-47s, these are semi-military organizations, eager to fight and armed to the teeth, desperately looking for action and avoiding any kind of moral debate on actions and consequences. The debate over consequences is actually taking place in Cairo and in Jerusalem, and between the two. The Egyptians were hit head on with this attack. From this day forward, the Egyptians will have a hard time ignoring the radical terrorists weeds growing in the flowerbeds of Islam. Mohammed Morsi's government had to do a body count on Sunday, and now it has to explain to its people how the attack was perpetrated by an internal enemy. In conversations with Israeli officials on Sunday, the Egyptians sounded confused. The upside is that they don't blame Israel, but the downside is that you'd have to be extremely optimistic to believe that this event will prompt Egypt to do something about Sinai. Israel will have to continue relying on itself, on intelligence, and operational success. We can only hope that we won't be dragged into a military confrontation in Gaza, or a diplomatic confrontation with Egypt. As the hours pass, the culprits will emerge, and decisions will have to be made on whether to retaliate and how. If the culprits are in Sinai, that's easy: Israel will honor Egyptian sovereignty and refrain from issuing a response. But if the culprits came out of Gaza, we may find ourselves embroiled in a serious round of fighting in the south. All these questions would be far more poignant if Sunday's attack had been successful, God forbid. Anyone who is involved in security knows that Sunday's success does not guarantee success the next time around. If there is anything to be learned from Sunday's event it is that not only Olympic records are being broken, but records are also being broken along the Sinai border: the insanity record, the violence record, the callousness record, the boldness record. This teaches us that a new kind of terror has come to town. Violent, dangerous, and a threat to everything we've ever known, kindly brought to us by the people of the Global Jihad, coming at us from Syria and from Egypt. As of Sunday we can safely say: Iraq is already here.
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