Once Israel and Hamas gave him enough room to broker an agreement, he saw an opportunity to cover a move on the domestic side -- his assault on the judiciary -- through the goodwill he'd earned from the Americans and others.
Morsy is not like Egyptian presidents of yesteryear -- Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak --when it comes to the peace process. He has other objectives right now, and reaching out to Israel or pressuring Hamas or Abbas to accept concessions aren't among them. As a Muslim Brother (once a BRO always a BRO), Morsy will have a tough time accepting major concessions on Jerusalem. Indeed, he can barely bring himself to talk about two states. But in the short term, he too benefits by stability in Gaza and a longer-term ceasefire.
Israel
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Gaza ceasefire offered a lifeline: He demonstrated two months before an election that he has functional relationships with U.S. President Barack Obama and Morsy, avoided a costly incursion into Gaza, and restored quiet to Israel's southern communities -- all without making any major concessions.
The current Israeli government cannot afford a big peace-process effort right now. Barring some event we cannot divine, Netanyahu will be in a position to form the next Israeli government. The ceasefire agreement ensures it.
But Bibi won't want a bold peace-process move next year, either. Moving forward on borders, Jerusalem, and refugees will divide his coalition and confront him with agonizing choices he doesn't want to make. And besides, his major priority in 2013 won't be the peace process, but Iran. It may well be that no Israeli premier would be in a position to make major concessions on a Palestinian state until there's much more clarity on the Iranian nuclear issue. A long-term de facto agreement with Hamas serves his purposes too.
Abbas, America, and the two-state solution
There's no need to belabor the obvious. The current alignment of Egypt, Hamas, and Israel will come at the expense of Abbas and the peace process. And there's little he can do about it. Pushing for observer state status this week at the United Nations may be critical for Abbas -- but it counts for very little given what's happening on the ground.
Abbas will remain relevant because the two-state solution is too important to fail even though it's too complex to implement. And besides, the current Egypt-Hamas-Israel troika won't hold forever. Hamas will rearm and reload, and there are limits to the economic concessions Israel is prepared to make in Gaza. Sooner or later these two will come to blows again, and Morsy will find himself forced to push for more from the Israelis.
Still, if left to its own devices, the current alignment may well conspire to shape the political landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict away from a conflict-ending solution toward a series of provisional outcomes -- some more manageable than others.
One thing is clear. There will be no meaningful peace initiatives coming from Egypt, Hamas, Abbas, or Israel. That leaves the Obama administration -- perhaps the only conceivable peace process actor now -- to contemplate changing this new status quo.
And because this president has either convinced himself or been convinced by others (perhaps rightly) that the two-state solution may well expire on his watch if nothing is done, I suspect he'll try to do something significant -- regardless of the odds against success.
There's no stopping it: Beavers build dams, teenagers talk on the phone, and American presidents and secretaries of state conduct very serious diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli peace process. It's in our DNA. We can't help ourselves -- nor, in the minds of many, should we control ourselves. The peace process and its imagined outcome -- a two-state solution -- has been sainted and canonized in America's foreign policy.
Even so, the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking seems to recede further from our grasp with each passing year. One can only hope that, this time around, the president's foray into the peace process is better considered, better timed, and more thoughtfully conceived than his first.
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