When is a truce not quite a truce? Hamas is once again offering Israel a cease-fire, but the language that the Islamic movement has chosen reveals a deep reluctance to talk about any real peace with the Jewish state. Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza's Hamas prime minister, on Wednesday proposed a "tahdia" — which in Arabic means a loosely defined period of calm that falls short of a formal cease-fire.Still, this semantic nuance could well determine the success of Mideast peacemaking. As long as Israelis and the Islamic militants are killing each other in Gaza and southern Israel, a U.S.-sponsored drive to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal by year's end stands little chance.
Israel is formally rejecting the truce talk, and on Wednesday its army killed four militants in the West Bank town of Bethlehem after opening fire on their car. Israel sees a broad Iranian-driven effort to besiege it from the north through Hezbollah in Lebanon and from the south through Hamas, and fears a truce will simply give Hamas time to regroup and strengthen its fighting forces.
But other signs on the ground indicate that Israel and Hamas are moving closer toward an Egyptian-brokered deal to end weeks of cross-border fighting that has killed more than 120 Palestinians and five Israelis.
In a speech Wednesday at Gaza City's Islamic University, Haniyeh demanded an end to Israeli military activity in Hamas-ruled Gaza, a lifting of Israeli economic sanctions, and the opening of Gaza's borders, which have been sealed since Hamas violently seized control of the area in June 2007.
"We are talking about a mutual comprehensive tahdia, which means that the enemy must fulfill its obligations," Haniyeh said. "The Israelis must stop the aggression ... including assassinations and invasions, end the sanctions and open the borders."
Palestinian militants have adopted the term tahdia (pronounced TAH-dee-ah) as an alternative to "hudna" — a legal concept dating to the birth of Islam. It refers to a truce of a fixed duration, usually between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Prophet Muhammad first negotiated a hudna (pronounced HOOD-nah) with rivals in Mecca in 628.
The concept of hudna could allow Islamic fundamentalists to negotiate without losing face. Some Hamas officials proposed a hudna with Israel after their group won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. But Israel, as it did with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat some 15 years earlier, demanded full recognition as a condition for doing business.
In Hamas' eyes, hudna does imply recognition of the enemy to some degree — which helps explain why the militants have backed away from the term. A tahdia is more open to interpretation, and presumably can be broken off at any time — as happened when Hamas unilaterally declared two of them in 2003 and 2005.
Israeli officials have repeatedly warned that the militants would use any lull to rearm. A formal truce with Hamas is not needed, the officials say, as long as the militants refrain from launching rockets and other violence. "If Hamas ceases its war against Israel, then there will be quiet," said Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister.