Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak's announcement of a joint Israeli-Egyptian inquiry into the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) helicopter attack, which killed five Egyptian policemen on August 18, marks Israel's belated and grudging recognition of new ground realities in the region. Mr. Barak's contemptuous initial comment was that the IDF's intended target — Gazans who had apparently crossed into Egypt's Sinai peninsula and then into Israel to carry out attacks near Eilat — had exposed Cairo's inability to control Sinai. The forceful Egyptian reaction, however, made Israel think and Mr. Barak has even expressed regret over the policemen's deaths. Egypt threatened to recall its Ambassador to Israel; it demanded an apology and compensation, and summoned the Israeli Ambassador to receive a formal protest. The Egyptian public, for its part, mounted angry demonstrations outside Israel's Cairo Embassy. And Amr Moussa, former head of the League of Arab States and an Egyptian presidential candidate, declared that Israel must realise that the day "our sons get killed without a strong and appropriate response is gone and will not come back."

The issues go far beyond both Israel's need for Egyptian cooperation to ensure its own security and its dependence on natural gas from the trans-Sinai pipeline — which has been sabotaged several times. The key point is that the Zionist state, which makes much of being a democracy surrounded by dictatorships and despotic monarchies, is finding it very difficult to respond to the changes in Egypt. For nearly 33 years after it signed the Camp David agreement with Egypt, Israel could rely on the autocratic rule of Anwar Sadat and the even more brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak to enforce a one-sided arrangement whereby Egyptian governments avoided any mention of justice for the Palestinians, suppressed internal dissent as well as public support for the Palestinian cause, and restricted their troop deployments in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt may currently have a military government rather than a full-fledged democracy, but the Tahrir Square protests that removed Mr. Mubarak from office have made the new rulers in Cairo much more responsive to public feeling about their relations with their neighbour. Secondly, the traditional inhabitants of Sinai, the Bedouins, are now demanding redress for what they consider to be decades of discriminatory treatment by the majority Egyptian culture. In the rapidly expanding Egyptian public space, such issues will be increasingly articulated. Going by the evidence, it is clear that the idea of democratic states for neighbours is something Israel cannot handle.