While the representatives of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the Quartette (the US, EU, Russia and the UN) were recently hosted in Amman, Jordan, in an effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan met in Ankara with Hamas’ Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, who openly remains committed to Israel’s destruction and opposes any peace negotiations with Israel. This does not suggest that Mr. Erdogan’s support of Hamas’ position is against Israeli-Palestinian peace, but this raises the question as to whether or not Mr. Erdogan is willing to play a constructive role in mitigating the Israel-Hamas discord or whether he will continue to shore up Hamas’ obstructionist position to the detriment of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

For more than two decades I have been involved as a researcher, writer and as a back-channel interlocutor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question that has puzzled me as well as the multitude of observers, researchers and even those directly involved in the peace negotiations is why, after 64 years of blood and toil, successive Israeli governments and Palestinian authorities have failed to find a solution when, in fact, peaceful co-existence based on a two-state solution is the only sane choice.

The attack of hard-line Jewish settlers on an Israeli military base in the West Bank must not be seen as a passing incident that can simply be eradicated by punishing the perpetrators, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said in the Israeli Parliament. This dangerous and most deplorable incident is a byproduct of the continuing settlement policies that Netanyahu and his hard-core coalition partners have zealously been pursuing for the past three years. Netanyahu condemns the attacks on individual settlers while such policies continue to focus on the rapid expansion of the settlements, further strengthening the settlers’ movement, which, for all intents and purposes, has acquired a de-facto veto power over policies affecting the future disposition of the West Bank.