Israel and Hamas, the diplomatic dance behind the deal

Along withtheflurry of negotiations among senior government officials andheads of states, thepath to aceasefire between Israel and Hamas involved adiplomatic dance betweenthe twomain partieswho refuse to deal with each other directly.

Although a largenumber of participants, including officials from Turkey and Qatar, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, took part in the talks to resolve the conflict in Gaza, theprincipal playersin negotiating the ceasefire were officials from the U.S., Israel, Hamas and Egypt.

But since Israelis and Hamas officials will not hold face-to-face negotiations, it fellto Egypt, a country that has relations with both, to act as the facilitator.

U.S. officials alsohad to relay their concerns throughEgypt as the Obama administrationwill not speak directly with leaders fromHamas, whichthey havelabelled a terrorist organization.

"There are always indirect channels between parties who don't speak to each other," Janice Stein, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, told CBC News. "So Hamas speaks to Egypt, Egypt speaks to Israel, Israel speaks to the United States, United States speaks to Egypt, Egypt speaks to Hamas."

"These are really skilled people who do this all time," she added.

Although it's unclear how the negotiationswere carried out in this particular case, Michael Bell,a formerCanadian ambassador toEgypt, Israel and Jordan, said that often the process isas simple as the different parties being in different rooms or different floors of the same hotel.

"That begins a process of the facilitator speaking to one and then going to the other and negotiating with each of them, presenting each other's views and then trying tocome up with a middle ground that would be acceptable to both," Bell told CBC News.

In this case,if Israeli and Hamas negotiators staying in the same hotel happened to run into one another, they would just ignore each other, Bell said.

Thatneither side in this conflict will directly talk to oneanother does makefinding common grounda bit more challenging, Bell said. During his timesas Israeli ambassador in the early and late '90s, he said, negotiatorshadless problem getting representatives of Israelis and Palestinians to sit down and talk.

"We used to say the firstday is devoted to everybody attacking everybody and day two we started to work. All that would be multiplied in the present circumstances."

Coolhands

Bell said the Israeli-Hamasnegotiations this time probably benefited by being spearheaded by Egypt's new intelligence chief Mohammed Shehata,a longtime intelligence bureaucrat from the Mubarak regime. He is known to both sides for his role inmediating talks between Hamas and Israel regarding captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was released in a prisoner exchangeby Gazan militants in October 2011 after five years in captivity.

"Given his origins,I suspect he would be pretty practical," Bell said of Shehata. "These negotiations were not in thehands of some starry-eyed Muslim Brotherhood [official] but I'd suspect a cool old-time pragmatist."

During the ceasefire talks, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, but not with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or any Israeli official.

Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said that under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak there were more contacts between Israelis and the government of Egypt.

"What is missing here is the Israelis don't have a direct contact with the president of Egypt," Abrams said. "They used to talk to Mubarak but they don't talk to Morsi.

"Theonly party that appeared to be talking to everybody is Egyptian intelligence. So it places a lot on the intelligence people to first of all to be a faithful messenger but secondly to be a broker," said Abrams.

A former foreign policy official under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Abrams noted thatEgypt surprised manyobservers this time by reasserting itselfin the region and byplaying essentially the same roleit did under Mubarakthe broker and the middleman.

"People were saying Qatar's much more important, Turkey's muchmore important, but that's turned out today not to be the case. Cairo is the centre of Middle Easternpolicy again," he said.

Power broker

While Turkey and Qatar met with Egyptian officials earlier, Turkey, long seen as apower broker in the region, was unable to play any kind of substantial diplomaticrole this time around.

[IMAGEGALLERY galleryid=3366 size=small]

"Turkey had aspirations to play a role but it cut itself off from Israel as a result of its diplomatic dispute with Israel," Stein said. "Paradoxically it's been frustrated because it's not been able to have contact with both parties in the same way that Egypt does."

Qatar may have been able to assert some influence on Hamas after the country's emir recently pledged $400 million to Hamasfollowing a recent visit to Gaza, said Abrams.

But sidelined fromplaying any major rolewas Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. AlthoughMorsi,Clinton and Ban met with the Palestinian leader, those were mostly courtesy calls.

"If they bypass him completely ... it really undercuts the moderates and enhances the radicals," Bell said."Everybody knows his influence is limited, they want to give him a role, at least a cosmetic role where he's seen to be involved and consulted so he doesn't lose any more credibility that otherwise would be the case."