Jeff Goldberg wrote an op-ed in today's NYT titled "Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas".
Inadvertently, Goldberg shows why peace has eluded Israel thanks to Israel's own stance.
The crucial paragraph is the final paragraph:
The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.
The problem is that Israel has consistently sought to define their interlocutor; Fatah was for most of its history completely unacceptable as interlocutor for Israel. When US pressure forced Israel to talk to Fatah, Israel made sure that Fatah never achieved any progress. Israel demanded - and received - the concession that Fatah accepted the existence of Israel, but Israel failed to acknowledge that Palestine would encompass the land on the other side of the Green Line, including East Jerusalem. Israel undertook to freeze the settlements, but settlements expanded. Israel did not stop targeted killings, continued to bulldoze Palestinian houses, expanded the check-points that make ordinary life and travel in the Occupied Territories humiliating to impossible, destroyed Palestinian civil and commercial infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel had lots of time to give Fatah the successes it would have needed to persuade Palestinians that the concessions Fatah had made were worth it, that they yielded actual, tangible results and progress.
They didn't, and so Palestinians sought alternative representation. In the elections 2006, they turned away from a corrupt Fatah and elected Hamas.
The current situation reflects exactly the situation Israel created; when Fatah were strong, Israel nurtured Hamas to weaken Fatah. When Hamas won the elections, Israel and the US connived with Fatah to stage a coup against Hamas - which failed, with bloody consequences.
The first step to peace is for Israel to talk to whoever the PALESTINIANS put forward, not whoever Israel wants. So long as Israel refuses to do that, Israel is blocking peace.