Opportunities for regional realignment not likely to be seized

It also appears that Egypt, the central player in the future of Gaza, is exerting its influence to affect changes in Hamas’s leadership. Egypt has vetoed the arrival in Cairo of Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh. Mashal is viewed as a promoter of the interests of Qatar and Turkey, two opponents of Egypt, while Hanyieh is suspected by Egypt as having been involved in attacks by fighters from the military wing of Hamas on Egyptian soldiers and security forces personnel in Rafah. Egypt is more comfortable with Moussa Abu Marzuk, who lives in Cairo. Marzuk is nominally Mashal’s deputy, but has been a bitter rival of Mashal for some time now.

The marginalization of Qatar and Turkey
The marginalization of Qatar, and the removal of Turkey from involvement in the process, left Hamas with no backers. Three weeks ago Egypt proposed an unconditional cease-fire, which Israel and the Palestinian Authority accepted. Hamas rejected the Egyptian proposal, and with the encouragement of Qatar and Turkey, conditioned its agreement to a cease-fire on a long list of demands which had to be met before the shooting stopped.

In order to make the cease-fire proposal more palatable to Hamas, Secretary of State John Kerry two weeks ago conferred in Paris with the foreign ministers of Qatar and Turkey, and the three fashioned a new cease-fire proposal as an alternative to the Egyptian proposal. The Kerry proposal, however – heavily influenced by Qatar and Turkey — tilted so far in favor of Hamas, while failing to address the basic security requirements of Israel and the political needs of the Palestinian Authority, that both Israel and the PA rejected it out of hand.

Beyond the summary rejection of the proposal by Israel and the PA, leaders in the region – and analysts everywhere — viewed Kerry’s efforts as a costly, even if well-meant, blunder. Rather than support a straightforward, unconditional cease-fire proposal put forth by one U.S. ally (Egypt), accepted by two other U.S. allies (Israel, the PA), and supported by all other U.S. allies in the region (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf states except Qatar), Kerry appeared willing to pull Hamas – an organization designated by his own Department of State as a foreign terrorist organization – out of a tight spot with the help of Qatar and Turkey. Qatar is the major funder of Jihadist and fundamentalist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, while Turkey is the chief cheerleader of these groups. Both are bitter opponents of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Kerry proposal was dead on arrival, but it persuaded Hamas leaders that there was an alternative to the Egyptian proposal, leading them to continue the war for two more weeks, with the attendant destruction of their military machine and Gaza infrastructure. Only this past weekend, when Hamas leaders in Gaza – but not Khaled Mashal in Qatar – finally grasped that Qatar and Turkey were in no position to save them, they agreed to accept the original Egyptian proposal from three weeks ago.

In accepting the original Egyptian proposal, Hamas admitted that none of its long list of conditions would even be mentioned, let alone discussed, before the shooting would stop for at least seventy-two hours. Some of the items on Hamas list of demands will not be part of the discussions in Cairo even after the 72-hour period — Egypt has already announced, for example, that it would not allow for a seaport to be built in Gaza, as Hamas demanded.

The war in numbers
The war lasted twenty-nine days. The important numbers:

• Israel
  • 64 Israeli soldiers killed
  • 3 Israeli civilians killed
  • 463 soldiers injured
  • 82,201 reservists called up
• Palestinians
  • 1,778 Gazans killed — of which:
    • 750-1,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed (Israel has identified 562 of them by name)
    • 208 women
    • 393 children
  • 4,762 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets destroyed
  • 10,000 buildings destroyed
  • 30,000 buildings damaged
  • 462,000 forced to evacuate their homes
• Weapons
  • 32 Hamas attack tunnels leading into Israel destroyed
  • 3,356 rockets launched at Israeli towns and cities
  • 579 intercepted by Iron Dome
  • 116 rockets or rocket fragments fell in built-up areas

The future
Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip in June 2007. This is the third round of war between Israel and Hamas since then — the first round took place in December 2008-January 2009, and the second in November 2012.

Can the fourth round be prevented?

Hamas’s weakness
Both rounds were followed by an intensive rearming effort by Hamas, helped by Iran and Syria.

Hamas will find it more difficult to rearm this time. It was kicked out of Syria, where its leadership was located for twenty years, after deciding to shift its support from the Assad regime to the Sunni rebels against Assad. Hamas’s support for the anti-Assad rebels has also irked Assad’s main supporter, Iran, and the latter has since shifted its support from Hamas to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Iranian leaders made some speeches supporting Hamas in the current round, and there are a few Hamas leaders who want to repair relations with Iran, but any help countries such as Iran would want to extend to Hamas will be limited by the major change in the region: the toppling of the pro-Hamas regime of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its replacement by a military regime hostile to Hamas (now designated by the Egyptian government as a terrorist organization).

Israel-Moderate Arabs convergence of interests
The anti-Hamas turn in Egypt has been accompanied by a growing worry among moderate Sunni states – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf states (except Qatar), Morocco, and others – about the rise of fundamentalist political Islam. These states view the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas the same way they view Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, and other Islamist groups threatening to destabilize the region.

These moderate Sunni states have another worry: Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions.

The moderate Arab states thus share the very same concerns Israel does, as their growing concern about Sunni Islamist fundamentalist movements and Shi’a expanding regional ambitions are identical to Israel’s concerns.

The one stumbling block which prevents much closer, and open, strategic cooperation between Israel and the majority of the Arab states is the unsettled Israel-Palestinian conflict. As long as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian lands and deny Palestinians their right to self-determination – full-fledged, open cooperation between Israel and the moderate Arab states will be limited.

Thus, without settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, there will be nothing to prevent yet another round of war between Israel and Hamas or another Palestinian faction, a few years from now.-

What’s past is prologue
The conditions for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict have never been more auspicious: a militarily weakened Hamas, a moderate Arab block hostile to militant Islam, and a convergence of interests between Israel and the moderate Arab states.

It is doubtful, however, that the Netanyahu government will seize the opportunity for a breakthrough in Israel-Palestinian relations. During the month-long war, Netanyahu has given no indication that he sees this round of Israel-Hamas war in anything other than tactical terms, and has offered nothing to show that he plans to exploit the military results of the war, together with the changing political context in the region, for a bold and creative initiative which would change Israel’s relations with the PA, transform Israel’s strategic position in the region, and realign regional politics.

Netanyahu, in other words, will likely continue in the path of previous Israeli governments. In the past twenty years, successive Israeli governments— with the exception of the Ehud Olmert government in 2006 — have proved more willing to perpetuate the status-quo, with all its problems, rather than make the deep, and painful, decisions which Israel would have to make for peace with the Palestinians (the Palestinians will have to make equally painful decisions).

The only way to prevent a fourth round between Hamas and Israel is to convince Palestinians that there is a better way to achieve their legitimate aspirations. Trouble is, Muhammad Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, having publicly renounced the use of violence, cannot show how they have advanced the cause of Palestinian statehood. The PA’s security services have been closely cooperating with their Israeli counterparts in fighting terrorism in the West Bank, and in some parts of the West Bank the standard of living has been rising, but Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, making a viable Palestinian state less and less feasible with every passing year.

With Israel – and also the Palestinians – unwilling to make the painful decisions which would allow the emergence of an independent Palestinian state next to Israel, more rounds of violence should be expected.

Barak Ravid, the political analyst of Haaretz, said it well:

At no point during the past month did Netanyahu set any diplomatic goals for the war, not even the most minimal ones, even though numerous options and opportunities for creative and sophisticated diplomatic initiatives to end the war presented themselves. Such moves could have isolated Hamas, mobilized the international community on Israel’s behalf, rebuilt Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian Authority, and strengthened the moderate forces in the region. Netanyahu preferred not to pursue them.

As in the past, Netanyahu returned the political passivity that he excels at, which accompanied the war from day one. Netanyahu went with the flow or was dragged along, waiting for someone else — Egypt, the United States or the UN secretary-general – to come up political solutions and pull the chestnuts out of the fire.

For an entire month a war was conducted in Gaza without the prime minister and members of the security cabinet holding a single discussion on how Israel would want its relationship with Gaza to look once it was over. The result is that after thousands of rockets fell on half of the country, an unprecedented shutdown of Ben-Gurion Airport, serious economic, diplomatic, and public-relations damage, and a heavy toll of more than 60 soldiers and civilians killed, Israel is exactly where it was before.

It won’t matter how anyone tries to whitewash the talks in Cairo, the reality is that Benjamin Netanyahu is on the verge of his third diplomatic agreement with Hamas in five-and-a-half years as prime minister. After the deal that freed captured soldier Gilad Shalit [2011] and the cease-fire that ended Operation Pillar of Defense [November 2012], there will be an arrangement that will end the current crisis. It will be the same tactical arrangement that was tried endless numbers of times before – the same understandings with Hamas that might or might not hold up.

If Operation Protective Edge [the English name for the current operation; the Hebrew name is Operation Solid Rock] results in eight years of quiet in the south, similar to what the Second Lebanon War [July-August 2006] did for the north, it will be chalked up to Netanyahu as an enormous achievement. But that’s still a huge question mark. The results of previous arrangements in Gaza are not encouraging. They led to nothing but a few months of quiet until the next confrontation while eroding the position of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas even further, and gave legitimacy to a murderous terrorist organization.