No matter how the current round of fighting between Hamas and the Palestinians’ resistance groups and Israel may end, a number of significant factors have come together to point to a new reality that is now taking shape on the ground.
While the war on Gaza may not have been the direct product of the failure of the Israeli/PLO peace talks sponsored by US Secretary State John Kerry, it is hard to ignore the connection between their failure to make progress towards a political resolution of the Palestine/Israel conflict and the resumption of hostilities on the Gaza front.
It was out of the conviction that the US-sponsored talks had come to a dead end, that both Fateh and Hamas decided to overcome their differences and give priority to their longstanding attempts at national reconciliation instead. Just as importantly, PA President Abbas had succeeded in securing international – and particularly US – support for the new Palestinian government, despite vociferous opposition from Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu and his attempt to evoke Hamas ‘terrorism’ as an insurmountable obstacle to legitimizing any form of Palestinian reconciliation.
Furthermore, the PA/PLO had seriously begun to consider its next ‘unilateral’ moves at the UN within the framework of seeking international legal and diplomatic/political recognition of a Palestinian state in a relatively sympathetic international climate where most parties were blaming Israel for the greater share of responsibility for the failure of the peace talks, the EU was growing increasingly critical of Israeli settlement policies, and even the US – Israel’s most consistent advocate and protector – had begun to show some weariness with its ally’s intransigence and ill-disguised disdain for Washington’s endless efforts on its behalf.
The June 12 Hebron attack on young Israeli settler yeshiva students came to offer Netanyahu a way out. Although the Israeli government knew within a matter of hours that they had been killed immediately, it moved quickly to exploit the attack to the fullest extent possible by pretending to be searching for the kidnapped students. This pretense allowed the Israelis to launch a massive campaign against Hamas on the West Bank (without offering any proof of its complicity) backed by orchestrated international rallies and tearful appeals from the young settlers’ parents, all meant to challenge Abbas’ credentials as a political partner and emphasizing his apparent preference for siding with ‘terrorism’ rather than peace.
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