Tonight at midnight another cease-fire will expire. Everyone is pessimistic over whether a deal can be reached. There is a good chance they are correct. After examining the sides' positions under a magnifying glass, it is hard to see how the gaps can be bridged. Still, hope is not lost. On the last night of the Camp David negotiations in 1978, Israelis went to bed knowing that the peace talks with Egypt had collapsed. The next morning they awoke to the most important diplomatic accord ever signed with an Arab state. On occasion, perhaps only rarely, the last night provides its own magic. It creates a type of deus ex machina, unexpected salvation. At Camp David in 2000 no such salvation was forthcoming. On Tuesday morning we will know. In the Middle Eastern bazaar the sides pull the rope until the last moment, and then a little bit more. On Sunday evening the overriding assessment was that a deal would not be reached. It is clear to everyone what will happen if Hamas starts shooting again. No one has any idea what will happen if it does not. Former IDF intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, currently the director of the Institute for National Security Studies, has not shared in the hopes of most Israelis that Hamas will agree to the Egyptian proposal. While the proposal prevents the smuggling of weapons into Gaza, it does not prevent Hamas from manufacturing them on its own. The rockets fired at Israel throughout Operation Protective Edge were, in Yadlin's words, Gaza-made. Hamas will reopen its rocket workshops. Based on this precept, it appears that while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's formula of "rehabilitation in exchange for demilitarization" is palatable, it is not feasible. However, it does hint at another worthy formula -- rehabilitation in exchange for a process that prevents Hamas' rocket warehouses from filling up again. Quiet without an agreement will supposedly grant Israel advantages. For example, it will be able to destroy tunnels before they approach Israeli territory, and it will be free to employ operational creativity to surprise the enemy, which it was unable to do in Operation Protective Edge. Under such circumstances, Israel could increase its intelligence-gathering operations in the Gaza Strip -- an issue over which Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security agency will squabble. Eventually, whichever body assumes responsibility for gathering intelligence in Gaza will need to replenish the networks of human agents there. It is easy to understand Israelis who believe it is preferable to maintain the current modicum of ambiguity on the ground but with clear deterrence, rather than reach a complicated agreement that is restrictive and difficult to implement. Those who hold this view, however, need to take into account that they will not be able to prevent two problems: • As long as there is quiet, Israel will seek to uphold it, even if it has viable information about the whereabouts of Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif and his cohort. It would do so despite not being bound by an agreement in Cairo. • The international community will calm down, and the government in Israel, which will have returned to its original position of intransigence toward Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, will find that the other countries have also returned to their fundamental positions. The world will return to pressuring Israel on the Palestinian matter in Judea and Samaria, and on this front Israel will no longer find Egypt at its side.
