the challenge of bringing together two rival parties with distinct ideologies burst into view, with each side presenting a different picture of what the accord means and what produced it.
On the one hand, the unity government as
Mahmoud Abbas...said, will have only two functions, to rebuild Gaza and set up elections within a year.
“The new government and peace talks are two different things,” Mr. Abbas told a group of Israelis who signed what they called the Israeli Peace Initiative...for negotiations to begin, he needed a moratorium in Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, a condition that Israel rejects.
Aides to Mr. Abbas [said]Hamas had suddenly found itself in a position of weakness...“They are in trouble, and so they reached out,” one Abbas aide said of Hamas.
But, there is the other side:
“There are no negotiations now, so let’s not speak about illusions that may or may not happen,” Taher al-Nounou, a Hamas spokesman, said when told of Mr. Abbas’s comments. “The Israeli government has nothing to offer to the Palestinians. It even refused to freeze settlements.” But he said that Hamas would abide by any P.L.O. negotiations...Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader who was in Cairo for the Egyptian-brokered Palestinian negotiations, said he saw no place for peace talks with Israel under the new arrangement. “Our program does not include negotiations with Israel or recognizing it,” Mr. Zahar told Reuters. “It will not be possible for the interim national government to participate or bet on or work on the peace process with Israel.”
Israelis on the left were interviewed (as was a senior Labour Party figure) :
“I have always felt that divisions within Palestinian politics were not good for peace and see this as a step forward,” said Tamar Hermann [so, she's "left" officially]...Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, said in a telephone interview that he had always believed that “there will be no serious progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without some way of including Hamas in the process so as to transform them from being part of problem to being part of the solution.” But this is a minority view in Israel.
But did Ethan interview the another 'minority' view or perhaps it is the majority view? Can Hamas transform itself? Does it wish to do so? Did Fatah/PA demand so?
Why no Yesha Council figure or anyone representative of the 350,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria interviewed? No Member of Knesset from the oppositionist nationalist camp?
We have no opinion, no right to an input, no influence? We're not a part of this scenario?
All the news - and some that doesn't fit.
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