My Brother's Keeper: Month 2, Week 1, Day 7.

It turns out that US Secretary of State John Kerry did not leave the region yesterday as scheduled. Instead he delayed his departure for more then six hours before finally holding a press conference to confirm that Qatari/US efforts to broker a ceasefire had failed.

Normally when things like this succeed the details are kept as closely guarded secrets. When they fail people prefer for them to disappear completely. However from what I can gather it appears that Hamas' demands were primarily economic. Essentially they want a full lifting of the blockade of Gaza allowing Gazans free movement into Israel and the free flow of goods - particularly fuel oil for electricity - into Gaza. This would include the lifting of the naval blockade which would allow Gazan fishermen to put to sea. Hamas also wants the 50 or so prisoners who were re-arrested in the West Bank in response to the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers to be released and the completion of the final phase of prisoner releases that were negotiated as part of the deal that freed Gilad Shalit.

With the exception of the prisoner release Israel seems largely happy to meet these demands with a few small conditions. For a very obvious reason Israel cannot allow Hamas fighters to roam freely into Israel especially now that they begun to use suicide bombing as a tactic once again. Nor can it allow Gazan fisherman unrestricted access to the Mediterranean sea in case they are used as a cover for weapons smuggling.

What Israel is prepared to offer is a large increase in the volume and type of goods flowing into Gaza from Israel. The blockade itself is nowhere near as complete as anti-Israel protesters seem to think that it is having been substantially loosened on several occasions since Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9. On every occasion that loosening of the blockade has had the effect of damaging Gaza's economy as always happens when a closed market is thrown open to high volumes of cheap imports. Israel is also prepared to offer Hamas a hydroelectric plant that will reduce Gaza's reliance on fuel imports increasing their energy independence and reducing their costs. Finally Israel is prepared to expand the distance from shore that Gazan fishermen are allowed to operate stopping just short of allowing them completely free movement.

So as has been the hallmark of this entire confrontation Israel appears to be doing everything in its power to give Hamas every opportunity to end the fighting meaning that both sides should be very close to an agreement. The problem has become the involvement of Qatar and the US.

Basically Qatar is trying to bribe Hamas into giving up on demands such as the prisoner release and the free movement of Gazans into Israel in return for a large cash payment. The current US administration obviously supports this because it allows them to paint themselves as the hero that brought peace to the middle-east during an election year. However this stifling of negotiation is likely to cause more problems then it solves by preventing Israel and Hamas working through their differences. The prisoner release issue strikes me as particularly important because the way those arrests were made in response to the triple kidnapping seems a major contributing factor that led to this confrontation at a time when peace negotiations were making more progress then they'd done in years.

The reason why Qatar is not only prepared to offer but appears to want to force Hamas into accepting this money is also very sinister. Although for the sake of simplicity I often lump them together in talking about the Syria conflict Saudi Arabia and Qatar are actually huge rivals for regional dominance. So not only are they fighting against the Syrian government they are also often fighting against each other with Saudi Arabia funding one group of insurgents while Qatar funds another.

The reason why Saudi Arabia started bankrolling Fatah's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was to turn them into a client state. That way they could be used to turn the US' ill-fated Israel/Palestine peace negotiations into a metaphor for the conflict in Syria making sure that the US got to hear more about Saudi Arabia's point of view then Qatar's. What Qatar is trying to do now is turn Hamas in Gaza into its own client state by bankrupting the local economy to get it hooked on aid money. That way it can use the negotiations that the US is trying to set up to make sure the US listens to Qatar's point of view about Syria.

This means that those negotiations will have absolutely nothing to do with ending the Israel/Palestine conflict which is mainly why the last round of US-led talks ended with both Israel and Palestine essentially telling the US to p*ss off in what I considered a substantial step forward.

Once Kerry had finally removed himself from the region Israel was free to declare a unilateral 12 hour humanitarian ceasefire to allow civilians and emergency services in Gaza to regroup and re-stock. Hamas also decided to join in with this ceasefire which should be coming to a successful end as I write.

Meanwhile Kerry travelled onto Paris, France for a meeting with EU, Turkish and Qatari foreign ministers. It appears that meeting has decided to attempt to impose the Qatari plan on both Israel and Hamas. Hopefully both will find the courage to resist that pressure because it is rather telling that neither Hamas, Fatah nor Israel were invited to the meeting. 

16:10 on 26/7/14 (UK date).