The Battle over Gaza

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No Time for Silence
Prospects for any kind of cease-fire aren't helped by the absence of U.S. leadership. With less than three weeks remaining in his term, President Bush can hardly influence events, and his successor seems unwilling to directly engage with the problem before the Jan. 20 Inauguration. But Obama, having endorsed Israel's right to respond to Hamas' rockets during his election campaign, may find that his present silence will cost him friends across the Middle East. The Gaza attack has strengthened Arab radicals while silencing the voices of moderate states once willing to improve ties with Israel. Egypt is in an especially tight spot: having brokered the old cease-fire and sealed its border with Gaza to lock in Hamas, the Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak is now being accused — by his own people and the larger Arab world — of looking the other way while Gaza burns. (Mubarak has responded by allowing some of Gaza's wounded to be brought to Egypt for treatment.)

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Also in a bind is Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian President viewed by Israel and the U.S. as a credible partner in peace. Many Palestinians now regard him as an irrelevancy — or worse, a collaborator. Abbas "has staked his political legacy and his vision of the Palestinians finally achieving their rights on negotiation with the Israelis," says Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "And it's hard to negotiate with the Israelis as they are bombing the Gaza Strip." (See pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza.)

The very basis of Abbas' negotiations with Israel may be moot. The Bush Administration's peace plan, based on a Palestinian state and Israel's living side by side, is moribund. For all practical purposes, there are two Palestinian states. Abbas, who rules the West Bank, has no leverage in Gaza, where Hamas reigns supreme. Neither Israel nor the U.S. has been prepared to deal directly with Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist. But without a seat at the negotiating table, the militants have little to lose by escalating violence. In Gaza, most Palestinians blame Israel and not Hamas — whom they view as legitimately elected representatives — for the current bloodshed. So even without the latest flare-up, Gaza was poised to be a confounding problem for Obama. But now, warns Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, the new President is "going to inherit a crisis with horrible pictures, reduced and diminished American credibility, without the capacity and the means to actually influence the situation."

How will Obama respond? As a presidential candidate, he called for a new peace process but was short on the details. "A U.S. Administration has to put its weight behind a process, recognizing that it's not going to happen immediately," he said during a visit to Israel last summer. "That's why I will not wait until a few years into my term or my second term ... to get the process moving." That was meant to be a dig at the Bush Administration, which left it too late to pursue peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Now the Obama Administration risks being too late even before it has begun.

With reporting by Jamil Hamad / Ramallah, Aaron J. Klein / Sderot and Mark Thompson / Washington

See pictures of 60 years of Israel.