The precondition Israel never presented: Palestinian unity

It’s hard to envisage peace without Hamas on board, yet Israel never demanded that as a precursor to talks (By Elhanan Miller, Times of Israel, 2.4.14)

A short report by Palestinian news agency Ma’an was overlooked on Tuesday amid the diplomatic frenzy surrounding an American bid to extend peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians beyond April.

The Palestinian Authority, Ma’an reported, established a “high national committee” tasked with reaching out to Hamas to immediately hold parliamentary and presidential elections. The committee comprises five Palestinians: Fatah official Azzam Al-Ahmad; independent businessman Munib Al-Masri; and the leaders of three tiny political factions: Mustafa Barghouti, Bassam Salihi and Jamil Shahada.

If such an agreement with Hamas is reached, the report continued, “the PA will turn to the UN organizations and immediately halt negotiations”...


   ...One former Israeli negotiator said that while both Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and reining in Hamas are crucial for a peace agreement, neither should be presented as preconditions for talks.

“Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is a critical and central issue, and has been so in previous negotiating rounds,” said attorney Gilead Sher, who took part in peace negotiations with Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000, under the premiership of Ehud Barak.

“But in previous rounds it was never a precondition for negotiations. The assumption was that when negotiations reach fruition, reciprocal recognition will take place: Israel will recognize the Palestinian state as the exclusive state of the Palestinian people, and Palestinians will recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people,” he told The Times of Israel.

Sher, who currently heads the Center for Applied Negotiations at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said that Palestinian negotiators have consistently voiced their willingness to accept Israel as the Jewish state at the end of the process.

“Reciprocity here is very important,” he said. “It will happen prior to the signing of a final status agreement, which is still far off.”

Unlike Amidror, Sher believed that writing off Gaza is a mistake. But an Israeli demand for Palestinian unity as a condition for talks would have a very low chance of succeeding at this time, he said.

“Israel has had very little success in influencing the leadership of our neighbors over our short history,” he told The Times of Israel. “Usually this ended in complete failure.”

It is the Americans who will eventually be expected to incorporate Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the political process. Meanwhile, Sher opined, Israel should “incrementally create a reality of two states for two peoples” through negotiations and even through “limited unilateral steps.”

The PLO is the “formal and exclusive representative” of the Palestinian people, he added. Abbas told Israel that he has a “formally signed agreement” with Hamas to accept any agreement he reaches.

“Gaza is not a different entity, and we shouldn’t consider it as such,” he said. “When we talk to one side of the Palestinian people, it is unacceptable for us to suffer attacks on residential centers in the Negev from the other side. The Americans will have to deal with this issue in the coming months.”

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