By William Booth and Anne Gearan, Updated: Friday, February 21, 7:00 AM
GAZA CITY — This crowded bit of Mediterranean shore is a long way from the closed-door rooms where Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are holding the first real peace talks in years.
But as Secretary of State John F. Kerry prepares to publicly present outlines of a proposed peace deal, the isolated and besieged Palestinian territory called the Gaza Strip is the rarely mentioned elephant in the bargaining room — a huge obstacle to a permanent settlement of the decades-old conflict.
Kerry has confined his peacemaking to Palestinians in the West Bank, a territory on the other side of Israel, and he envisions a deal signed by the moderate leadership there. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are governed by the militant Islamist Hamas movement, which opposes talks with Israel and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, and they are not part of the negotiations.
That means that if a deal could be done right now, the 1.6 million people who live in Gaza — about 40 percent of the population in the two Palestinian territories — would essentially be left out.
“Gaza and Hamas represent the real conundrum of the peace process. You can’t do a conflict-ending deal without them, and you can’t do one with them either,” said Aaron David Miller, a Mideast scholar at the Wilson Center and a U.S. adviser in failed peace negotiations in which Gaza played a central role.
Note: pretty depressing read. Makes me want to insert head into sand and pretend things are alright. But they're not alright. Learn from this. Let's put our heads together and begin to bend the paradigm.
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