This narrative is at least based on some form of reality; at least in this narrative, people, places, names and motives are fully explained.
To dispute this is to contend that the Israeli kidnapping/capture/arrests of elected Hamas government was an operational response to Hamas violence, when in fact it ensures that NO negotiations would continue on any level, including this peace plan, or the release of the soldier, or anything else.
Israel concluded that brutal force was the ONLY response even though there was an active set of negotiations going on regarding this as well as Hamas negotiating 'recognition' of Israel.
Now is it true?
Here is an Time story written about this prior to the current 'ramp up'. Note there is a slant, but the elements of the above story's contention are present.
Abbas' Referendum Gamble Risks a Palestinian Backlash
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has issued an ultimatum to the elected Hamas government: Accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on Israel returning to its 1967 borders, or face a referendum on the issue. But the fact that Abbas on Tuesday extended the deadline for compliance by another three days suggests that he may be starting to realize what other observers already know — that if Hamas calls his bluff, Abbas could suffer yet another repudiation by Palestinian voters.
It's not that Hamas necessarily rejects the proposal, which is contained in a a document drawn up by prisoners from its own faction as well as Abbas's Fatah movement currently doing time in Israeli jails. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has already offered Israel peace in the form of a "long-term truce" if it withdraws to its 1967 borders, and Hamas is in fact in discussions with Fatah over that very issue. But Hamas, not surprisingly, is unwilling to accept Abbas's ultimatum. "I am not prepared to act with a gun to my head," Haniyeh said Monday.
....
One answer, perhaps, is that Abbas believes that adopting the prisoners' plan will negate Israel's claim that it has no Palestinian negotiating partner, making it more difficult for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to move ahead with plans to unilaterally redraw Israel's borders. But there's clearly a domestic political agenda, too: The grassroots-level Fatah warlords on whose support Abbas is increasingly dependent have, ever since they lost the January election to Hamas, agitated for an aggressive strategy to topple the new government.
Time
Of course the people that claim they want Peace for Israel and then consistently approve Likud's arbitrary brutal methods to obtain it is usually explain away these and many attempts to a real roadmap to peace by demanding a list of pre-conditions that ONLY one side has to follow -- which are typically the VERY issues under negotiation. So it's not really negotiating.
If you notice that this Process was lost almost immediately, even though it would have at the least given Israel the recognition from Hamas that it had demanded. Events on the ground, largely at the instigation of Israel (arrests, assassinations, civilian massacres) went from a simple kidnapping in Gaza against a background of active negotiations to an immediate propaganda escalation that necessarily included Hezbollah and then added the regional actors of Syria and Iran.
If you notice that the key to all this is to expand the number of actors in the conflict to preclude ANY possibility of a negotiation as obviously the national aspirations of both Iran and Syria are separate and distinct from what Hezbollah and the Palestinian organizations aspirations. Does anyone really dispute the fact that Syria and Iran are using these groups cynically as 'proxies' for their own ambitions. Nope...not in the least. Of course neither the US or Israel have impure motives, no more than the 'proxy' armies or freedom fighters the US financed in Afghanistan or El Salvador.
The Arab Muslims MUST look like they are the same in their motives and their actions co-ordinated by some central anti-semitic impulse and so that eliminates any real incentive to ever TAKE their actions towards peace or settlement seriously. In the US, even though a group might be simply negotiating something innocuous like CO emission controls, some political elements will wrap their opposition to it in terms of an attack on 'national sovereignty'. This is the tactic Israel has consistently used -- avoid negotiations through calculated single statements that contend it's sovereignty is in jeopardy.
But people know that it is not Israel's sovereignty that is being threaten, but what it DOES with that sovereignty that is being opposed. It has always been important that Israel be given this exceptional exemption to international law, standards or even existing settlement mechanisms. It doesn't matter if it is a coalition of Israeli legislators and Muslim clergy and academics or the UN or even the proposals from Israel's own peace groups -- they are all presented as a threat to Israel's existence...CONSISTENTLY.
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