White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said at the annual J Street conference on March 23 that Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders, with agreed upon mutual land swaps. He demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopt concrete steps proving his commitment to the two-state solution. One can assume that McDonough, like any astute observer, understands that the 1967 borders are as far from Netanyahu as is the White House from the premier's official residence on Jerusalem’s Balfour Street. Heavy pressure was required for the prime minister to even overcome pressures brought to bear by the settlers and hook up the new Palestinian town of Rawabi to the water supply. Without external pressure the week of March 27, Netanyahu would likely not have even released the Palestinian tax revenues withheld by Israel.

The elections of the 20th Knesset granted the next government a mandate to manage the conflict, not to promote its resolution. Experience proves that a reasonable management of the conflict requires cooperation between the Israeli government and the Palestinian unity government formed by Hamas and Fatah, dubbed the “national consensus government.”

In the periodic review submitted to the UN Security Council March 26, the UN special envoy to the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, called on the international community to give “full support,” both political and economic, to the national consensus government. In other words, the Dutch diplomat is suggesting that the United States and European Union ignore Israel’s opposition to cooperation with Hamas and promote the trilateral Fatah-Hamas-Israel hudna.

That same week, on March 24, it was reported that a delegation of Swiss diplomats had arrived on a visit to the Gaza Strip, Ramallah and Israel. According to the report, the delegation, headed by the former Swiss representative to the Palestinian Authority, Ronald Steininger, and the Swiss consul in Jerusalem, Paul Garnier, was in the region to help resolve the crisis over the salaries of Hamas officials who are not part of the organization’s military wing. Also, the press reported that at the same time the Swiss are working with Serry to leverage the salary arrangement into a broad-based diplomatic-defense-economic arrangement for Gaza. In its next stage the arrangement is supposed to end the confrontation between Gaza and the West Bank and to reunite them back into one entity, as required by the Oslo Accord.