After the storm

FOR decades archaeologists have searched for the ruins of Tida, Gaza’s lost port of the ancient world. Plans for a modern version look almost as mythical. Closed to most shipping since the six-day war in 1967, Gaza longs for the sea access that Israel has repeatedly considered in negotiations over the past two decades. The issue is once again on the table.

The two sides this week resumed indirect talks in Cairo designed to achieve a long-term ceasefire after five weeks of war. The guns have at least been fairly quiet in recent days. But the negotiations are complex, and the issue of Gaza’s blockade is central. The enclave’s power-brokers, the Islamists of Hamas, are trying to revive the idea of a seaport while scaling back demands for an airport and a corridor to the West Bank.

So far Israel, whose main objective is to get Hamas to demilitarise, has shown little interest. Its negotiators, say Palestinians in the talks, have offered to lighten but not lift the blockade of the enclave. Israel, they say, has proposed doubling the number of lorries allowed into Gaza to 600 daily, permitting 5,000 people to cross the border each day, and increasing Gaza’s exclusion zone at sea from three miles to nine. It also wants Hamas to return the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured on the battlefield in return for dozens of prisoners it rounded up in June after releasing them as a part of an earlier prisoner exchange.

Anxious to douse at least one of the region’s conflagrations, European diplomats are trying to help. Germany, France and Britain are pushing a plan offering a secure sea route from Gaza to Cyprus, perhaps by using Greek roll-on-roll-off vessels. Apparently they could land on Gaza’s shores within weeks. The plan also envisages a revival of the European Union’s border-assistance mission, EUBAM, a moribund monitoring initiative that briefly oversaw Gaza’s crossing point to Egypt at Rafah, but could in future also monitor crossings to Israel. That would provide the Palestinians with some access to international trade, and offer Israel some guarantees against Hamas’s rearmament. Such arrangements have been mentioned in agreements dating back to the Oslo accords in 1993, and again in 2000 and 2005.

The Europeans may attend a donor conference, tentatively scheduled for September 1st in Egypt, to finance the rebuilding of Gaza after the Israeli pummelling of recent weeks. They have repeatedly funded infrastructure that Israel subsequently destroyed and wish to stop this cycle. An EU-funded airport was opened in 1998 and bombed in 2001, 2009 and 2012. (Hamas, meanwhile, has taken steel bars from the airport’s ruins to build tunnels into Israel.) A small port with three berths as well as desalination and power plants have also been destroyed, rendering Gaza more dependent on Israel.

The war and its aftermath have provided an opening for Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He has had little say on Gaza since Hamas won elections there in 2006 and Israel persuaded Western countries to cut off ties with the Islamist government. Earlier this year, Hamas reconciled with Mr Abbas, much to Israel’s anger.

But Israeli attitudes are changing. Its ministers have championed Mr Abbas’s re-engagement in Gaza, and eased the ban on his ministers visiting the enclave, most recently allowing the deputy prime minister, Ziad Abu Amr, to inspect Gaza’s wreckage. Next off, says an Israeli close to the negotiations, will be the dispatch of two battalions (about 1,000 men) of Palestinian presidential guards to Gaza’s southern border, as a precursor to persuading Egypt to open the border at Rafah.

Although Mr Abbas offers a convenient interlocutor, rebuilding Gaza will inevitably require co-ordination with Hamas. Internally, the war may have weakened it. Only a few hundred answered a recent call for rallies in Gaza City. But in the West Bank its political capital has rarely been higher. Even pragmatic Palestinian businessmen marvel at Hamas’s relative success.

After weeks of trying to crush the Islamists, Israeli negotiators are increasingly engaging Hamas on the terms for a long-term ceasefire, albeit indirectly. “By day they will not meet, but by night it is impossible that they will not,” says Shaul Mishal, a veteran observer of the region and author of a book on Hamas. In the meantime, European diplomats hover on the edge of the talks. For all their ideas, they are hampered by anti-terror legislation and no-contact policies that make it more difficult for them to speak to Hamas than to far more extreme groups in, say, Afghanistan.