Washington: Imagine that, sometime in the past week, former UN boss Kofi Annan had flown to the Middle East and had some talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani about how to halt the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians.
Then Annan flies on to Doha, where he chews the fat with Hamas leader Khalid Mishal – and then flies off after recommending that Mishal and Rouhani should get on the phone and have their people nut out the terms of a ceasefire.
They come up with a document – and Israel is told to cop it.
Would the response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been any different to that from Hamas, when it rejected the first iteration of a cease-fire deal, produced on Tuesday, after former British prime minister Tony Blair called on Egyptian coup leader and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo and then went on to Jerusalem to see Netanyahu?
By Thursday, it seemed that Hamas representatives had been invited to join a new and far less secretive round of talks in Cairo, that included Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and an Israeli delegation.
As the talks went on, there were reports of a realisation on Sisi's part that however much he hates Hamas, any ceasefire deal would have to include some concessions for the Palestinian Islamist movement.
An Agence France-Presse report quoted International Crisis Group analyst Issandr El Amrani on the failed first ceasefire document which was accepted by Israel – "It seems to have been an Israel-Egyptian plan [to put Hamas] on the defensive,” he said.
Or as a report in the Times of Israel puts it: "Cairo basically put a loaded pistol on the table and gave Hamas until 9am to make a decision."
Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amira Hass says that Hamas found out about the proposed ceasefire from the media – and saw it as an attempt to humiliate it. Hass' Haaretz colleagues Barak Ravid and Jack Khoury report that not only was Hamas left out of the loop, so too were most of the Israeli cabinet.
They also reveal that there had been little enthusiasm for a ceasefire until Monday, when US Secretary of State John Kerry offered to come to the region to push for one. Suddenly, they suggest, Israel and Cairo had their diplomatic skates on, Israel worried that Kerry's presence would be read as US pressure on Israel; Cairo, because the generals wanted to show that they could live up to Egypt's historic role in brokering peace in Gaza.
The Egyptian document adopted points raised by Abbas in the preceding days but, the Haaretz duo write, "most of the negotiations over the cease-fire took place between Egypt and Israel".
According to the Ravid-Khoury report, when a member of the Israeli team asked whether Hamas would agree to the terms of the proposal, the Egyptians were reassuring, arguing that if Israel agreed, Hamas would have no choice but to do the same.
"In reality, the opposite occurred," they write. "The Egyptians gave Hamas' political leadership minimal information and didn't communicate with members of its military wing at all. The internal disputes between these two [Hamas entities] further contributed to the confusion, and to Hamas' feeling that Egypt was pulling a fast one."
Opening a window into a meeting of the Israeli cabinet, which pretty much rubber-stamped the deal, they quote an unnamed Israeli minister: "The general idea was that if the Egyptians had issued a cease-fire proposal, it would be inappropriate for Israel to reject it. Netanyahu and [Defence Minister Moshe] Yaalon told us that this is an opportunity to strengthen the alliance with Egypt, and that a positive response to the Egyptians' proposal would earn us a lot of brownie points internationally and increased legitimacy to expand the operation against Hamas if needed.
"This was true and logical, and most of the ministers were convinced. But a few hours later we discovered we'd made a ceasefire agreement with ourselves."
Still, Netanyahu leveraged the deal, claiming legitimacy and that Hamas had "shut the door on a diplomatic solution". Accusing Hamas of war crimes, he declared that Hamas "bore sole responsibility for the continuation of the violence".
By some media accounts, the Egyptians' take-it-or-leave-it cease-fire proposal, which Israel took and Hamas left, ignored all Hamas' demands. Instead it called an end to the fighting and for talks on a non-specific agenda.
But Yoram Meital, chairman of the Chaim Herzog Centre for Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University, told the Jerusalem Post that two aspects of the Sisi document – a requirement for Hamas to be disarmed of its rockets and the absence of any reference to reopening the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border – revealed Egypt's position to be closer to Israel's than to that of Hamas and the other Palestinian factions.
Given Sisi's onslaught against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his ousting of the man who had been Hamas' stoutest defender in the region, Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi, you have to wonder how or why Blair arrived at a conclusion that, a) Sisi might be an honest broker or, b) that Hamas would see the Egyptian ex-general as such.
It is interesting, too, that someone of Blair's calibre saw the need for "Bibi", as Netanyahu is known by Israelis, and Sisi to talk; but seemingly saw no need for anyone to talk to Hamas.
