To have any prospect of success the parties to peace talks must, above all, want to make peace. Tragically, it appears, neither Hamas nor Israel appears yet to have crossed that psychological threshhold. It involves either a degree of mutual trust in the other's intentions, or a calculation that the purpose of the military action has been achieved. Sadly, on both counts we appear not to be there yet, 22 days into the conflict in which more than 1,000 Palestinians and 51 Israelis have been killed, the killing interrupted only briefly by short, fitful truces.
Those realities are also reflected in the high bar set by both sides even for a preliminary ceasefire – demands for an end to the Gaza blockade, on the Palestinians' part, and for Gaza's "demilitarisation", the effective disarming of Hamas, on that of the Israelis. The failures of both sides to honour previous agreements complicate matters, hardening positions, while the prospects of any agreement are further diminished by the absence of direct interlocutors between the parties – US secretary of state John Kerry does not deal directly with Hamas. And the countries with the closest ties to Hamas and who have been acting as their sounding board, Qatar and Turkey, have toxic relations with Egypt, whose ceasefire plan has provided the broad framework for Kerry's efforts.
Even a few days of unconditional truce could lay the basis, Kerry hopes, for talks on achieving what he calls an “enduring solution” to the crisis, a phrase that Hamas could read as the lifting of the economic embargo and that Binyamin Netanyahu could interpret as the neutralisation of the group’s military threat. As for the beginning of discussions on a Palestinian state, that’s not even on the horizon.
In truth, however, as Ireland’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Patricia O’Brien, said in a speech last week on the crisis “no ceasefire will last without a serious political effort to address the causes of the disastrous situation in Gaza. It is imperative to bring about an end of the restrictions imposed on the people by the continuing Israeli blockade and the general closing off of Gaza.” That there is a direct causal connection between the prospect of any lasting ceasefire and a negotiated political settlement is a hard reality which, whatever one thinks of the Hamas rocket campaign, must be addressed, and specifically by Israel.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said yesterday that parties to the conflict have "expressed serious interest" in his request for a further 24 hour humanitarian ceasefire, but "have not yet agreed on the timing of its implementation." Unfortunately, we have been down this road before and even direct appeals from the likes of Barack Obama appear to be continuing to fall on deaf ears.