During a meeting of municipal council heads in Israel in May, Major General Sami Turgeman, commander of the IDF Southern Command, discussed his assessment of the situation in Gaza in light of the last Israeli war against Hamas and possible future rounds. He disagreed with the notion that the Israeli army should have worked to topple Hamas, an idea that was voiced by several senior government members during the last war. Turgeman held that it is in Israel's interests to keep Hamas in power “There is an independent rule in Gaza that behaves like a state,” he said. “Inside that state there is a ruler, Hamas, and at the moment there is no alternative to Hamas. Aside from that, there is no one else who can hold things together. The alternative is the IDF or chaos.” Turgeman also observed that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. “Most of the citizens in the Strip see Hamas as the only address for their problems,” he said. The Israeli general went on to explain the Israeli military establishment's assessment of the foreseeable future. According to Turgeman, there are four possibilities: “The first [is] ongoing warfare without periods of calm. That would mean that there would be no more tunnels, but it would also mean that we (Israelis) would be living under a protracted state of emergency. “The second possibility [is] to accept that the periods of calm would be used by Hamas in order to rebuild its strength in which case we (Israel) could be certain that there would be recurrent rounds of war every few years. The third possibility [is] to reoccupy the Strip, in which case we (Israel) would be responsible for 1.8 million people in every sense of the word. “The fourth possibility is a political solution. This is a complicated issue for us and we need to ask ourselves who we would agree with, under what conditions, and the repercussions this would have regarding the relationship with the PA and with Egypt. We have to choose between these options.” He added: “In my opinion we need to find as many quiet periods as possible, with the knowledge that occasionally there will be a [military] campaign, and so there is no need to be surprised when it happens every few years … I hope that the period of quiet after Protective Edge will be prolonged.” As coincidence would have it, PA President Mahmoud Abbas was in the Jordanian capital Amman around that time to discuss the “available options and cards” that could be used to prevent the Palestinian national project from falling victim to the extremism of the Netanyahu government. At a dinner hosted in his honour by former Jordanian interior minister Samir Al-Habashna, and attended by senior Palestinian and Jordanian politicians, Abbas unveiled a heavy-duty surprise that adds a new and unexpected dimension to Israeli intransigence toward the PA in Ramallah. The Palestinian president told the dinner guests that he had, in his car, a complete dossier on all the secret communications between the Israelis and Hamas. These talks were being conducted well away from the eyes of the media at time when Hamas continues to hurl baseless accusations against the PA. He said that the talks started with negotiations over the return of the remains of an Israeli soldier being held in Gaza, but developed into talks over a comprehensive political framework regarding the future of the Strip and the entire Palestinian cause. The information we have confirms President Abbas's claim and, indeed, converges with what he described concerning the future of Gaza and the Palestinian cause. Both Turkey and Qatar have recently communicated with Israel with the purpose of discussing a proposal for a new long-term ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Hamas. Turkey suggested a five-year period of calm, during which an offshore port would be constructed near Gaza ¾ specifically in the vicinity of the Turkish part of Cyprus ¾ as an assembly point for ships bearing goods to and from Gaza under international supervision. A Qatari delegate visited Israel and met with General Yuav Mordakhai, coordinator for the activities of the Israeli government in the Palestinian regions, in order to lay out the Turkish-Qatari plan in more detail. Two Hamas delegates were present. The Qatari action is another sign of Doha's intention to take over the mediation role between Israel and Hamas, replacing Egypt's historically recognised role. The Qatari proposal, in addition to the construction of a port, called for a halt to all hostile activities between the two sides for five years. According to the details outlined by the Qatari representative, all the goods destined for Gaza via the port that Qatar would finance in full would be subject to security inspections by NATO before heading off to Gaza. Turkey, as a NATO member, would perform this function. Naturally, these tripartite arrangements could not be kept in the dark for long. Within hours after Abbas's meeting in Jordan, WALLA, an Israeli news website close to official circles in Tel Aviv, reported that a number of messages had recently been exchanged between Israel and Hamas with regard to a truce, while Ahmed Yusef, a Hamas commander in Gaza, was quoted as saying that there had been Turkish-mediated “chats” between the two sides. The website also reported that senior PA sources it had contacted voiced their fear that the “terrorist Muslim Brotherhood” planned to establish a state in Gaza with Israeli and Turkish support. The website stressed that unofficial Israeli figures were indeed involved in communications of this sort with Hamas in an attempt to seek a solution to the situation in Gaza. A senior Hamas official denied the existence of such communications. He also said that the Turkish proposal was not new, having been suggested before as a possible solution to circumvent Egypt's control over Gaza's only outside crossing, especially now that Hamas relations with Egypt have entered a dark tunnel due to animosity in Cairo against the Muslim Brotherhood. Alex Fishman is the military affairs analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth and is closely connected to security decision-making circles in Tel Aviv. He discussed a number of significant developments in a lengthy report on the situation in Gaza. He wrote that although the Israeli army carried out retaliatory strikes against locations in Gaza in response to missile fire from the Strip, representatives from the Israeli government and its security agencies were conducting talks with Hamas. Some of these talks were direct, others were indirect, but the ultimate aim was to reach a long-term truce between the two sides. According to Fishman, three months before the Israeli general elections in March, Hamas presented a detailed proposal to Israel for a five- to ten-year calm. Security sources in Israel stated that the Israeli government did not respond to the proposal at the time. Now, however, it was in the interests of the two sides to cooperate. Accordingly, the “dialogue”, as Fishman called it, covered the question of the reconstruction of Gaza, the development of its infrastructure ¾ such as electricity grids and water networks ¾ and the construction of a port. The analyst, citing the same security sources, noted that what was taking place between the two sides would not please Egypt because it circumvented the PA in Ramallah. As this would completely undermine the government in the West Bank and drive it into a dangerous vortex, bypassing the PA has always been a red line for Egypt since it first began to assume a mediating role, in the era of Yasser Arafat. The various analyses and commentaries of Israeli leaders arrive at this point. They are still studying all possibilities proposed by the Turkish-Qatari-Hamas trio while Ankara is lobbying Israel in its fashion to accept the proposal. When Erdogan congratulated Netanyahu for the electoral victory that won him another term, he conveyed a message suggesting that there were two ideas that required focus in the forthcoming period, as they would be of great advantage to Israel. The first was to eliminate the Egyptian mediation role in, and influence over, the question of Gaza and the Palestinian cause. The second was to reassert the idea of adjusting the Gaza-Sinai border, exploiting security conditions in Sinai due to the terrorist threat there to promote a land swap in which Gaza would be extended into Sinai and Egypt would gain, in return, a patch of the Negev desert. That was to have been the arrangement concluded with the Muslim Brotherhood before the group was swept from power with the assistance of the Egyptian army. Evidently, there is a push to revive that old deal, putting the fate of Sinai at risk in exchange for other rewards that still require payment. The writer is director of the National Centre for Security Studies.
