Where Did Israel Bomb Sudan From?

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Every single time, Israel confirms to the Arab regimes that they are decrepit regimes skilled at nothing but defeat and further descent into the depths of humiliation and disgrace, and it confirms to the Arab peoples that they are skilled at nothing but wishful thinking and prayers for the sudden appearance of a savior who will deliver them from their condition. Israel violates Arab land, airspace, and waters in comfort and safety, kills and destroys, and returns home safe and secure. The Arab regimes fall silent and keep quiet, but matters do not always remain concealed. Israel bombed Naga Hammadi in Egypt, and the Bahr al-Baqar school; it bombed installations in Syria and the Iraqi nuclear reactor; it bombed Tunisia and Jordan. This is what we know of; what we do not know is certainly greater still.

Israel roams freely through Arab skies, and even if this is not with the blessing of many of the Arab regimes, it knows that no one will challenge its aircraft, and that the Arab regimes possess no air defense systems capable of confronting them. Arab airspace lies completely exposed before Israeli warplanes, and among these regimes there is not one whose brow breaks a sweat over it, because each knows that the disgrace is shared and overwhelming, and there is no room for internal Arab one-upmanship.

Sudan remained silent about the attack, and were it not for the media outlets that picked up the news, the attack would never have been recorded historically, and the matter would have had no echo at all. I heard a Sudanese official say that Sudan might file a complaint with the Security Council, but he did not explain what the complaint would even be about. The Security Council will not fashion claws for the Arabs, not even hooves — all it will do is further ridicule Arabs who treat their defeats with complaints. And in any case, to whom does Sudan wish to complain? Does Sudan know precisely who bombed it, or does it want to rely on some distant hint from Olmert?

The important question is: from where did the planes pass? There is only one route — over the Gulf of Aqaba, then through the airspace of the Straits of Tiran, then the Red Sea. There is no other route Israel could cross with fewer scandals for the Arab regimes than this one. Someone might argue that the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba is international territory, and that Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia cannot confront Israeli warplanes under so-called international law. Note that the Gulf of Aqaba was closed to Israeli navigation before 1956 because it was Arab waters. Even if we accept this argument, the question remains: how do Israeli warplanes pass over the Straits of Tiran, which are purely Saudi-Egyptian airspace and fall under no interpretation of international law whatsoever? I do not think any military analyst would tell us that Israeli planes crossed the Mediterranean and looped around through Africa, or crossed Turkish airspace and then Central Asia to reach Sudan, just to avoid violating Arab airspace.

Some hypocritical Egyptian might say that Israel has the right to fly over the Straits of Tiran under the withdrawal agreement from Sinai that followed the 1956 war. It is true that Israel secured the opening of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli navigation after its occupation of Sinai in 1956, but that agreement said nothing about the movement of warplanes over Arab airspace — the matter remained confined to the movement of civil and commercial aircraft and ships. And even granting that Israel has this right, does Egypt not have radar and monitoring systems to know the destination of Israeli aircraft? Are things really so lax that Israeli planes can cross without anyone tracking them? Or is the Arab side not so innocent after all? Of course, we should not forget that the conference on tightening the siege of Gaza and pursuing arms smuggling into Gaza was held in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is supposedly Egyptian.

As for Sudan — why did you hide the news? Sudan has no air defense force capable of confronting Israeli warplanes, but this massacre and humiliation could have been avoided through sound security planning. For example, it is entirely impermissible to run a number of trucks in a single convoy on a single day, and it is impermissible in the first place to leave only a short gap between one truck and another. Does Sudan not know that Israel has an extensive intelligence and reconnaissance presence in the Horn of Africa region? Does it not know that the United States operates in the region and has previously bombed sites in Yemen? Security matters require extreme caution, but they also require a security mindset that thinks and concerns itself with how to avoid dangers.

The Arab regimes are not innocent of the equipment that was destroyed, nor of the blood of the Sudanese and others who fell in the operation.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “من أين قصفت إسرائيل السودان” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.