Last Sunday, representatives of the respective rulers of the Palestinian Authority and Gaza met in Doha with Qatari and Turkish officials to discuss temporarily setting aside their differences, ostensibly as a prerequisite to renewed negotiation with Israel. Ruthie Blum doubts the talks will produce tangible results, let alone good ones:
[T]he only thing on which Fatah and Hamas actually agree is the ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state. They are at odds about everything else, including the pace at which their shared aim should be carried out. But mainly, they . . . are engaged in a deadly power struggle.
So perpetual is this battle that the so-called unity deals the two groups signed in the past, most recently in April 2014, have unraveled before the ink on their contracts was dry. But the signatures did serve an unwitting purpose: to show those who still could not see that the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, was a partner for jihad, not peace with Israel. . . . The current wave of violence against Jews, through the use of rocks, knives, cars, and pipe bombs, is being carried out predominantly by Palestinians living in the West Bank, not all of whom are Hamas loyalists.
For its part, Hamas is not only rebuilding the terror tunnels destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, but it keeps releasing videos boasting of this endeavor and threatening to kidnap and kill Israelis. . . . Hamas’s latest production, released on Sunday (coinciding with the jump-start of negotiations with Fatah in Qatar) is a music video calling on Palestinians to resume suicide bombings on Israeli buses. . . .
How appropriate, then, that the discussions between the stabbers and the bombers should be held in Qatar, a state sponsor of terrorism. The only minimally positive outcome will be the lack of a resolution. . . . The only player in this jihadist “peace” farce that has something to gain is Turkey, which will get its [natural-gas] pipeline from Israel, without even turning its back on Hamas.
Read more on Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=15211