Israel Debates No. 16 11 November 2014 Following the war between Israel and Hamas: New political horizons for the peace process? Dear readers, For this issue of Israel Debates we have once again asked two authors to discuss the political consequences of this summer’ s war between Israel and Hamas. These hostilities triggered heated debates in Israeli society and politics, focusing on Israel’ s future prospects in a region characterized for decades by stable instability. The political debate is split down the middle. On the one side are those who cannot envisage a future for Israel unless it is based on military deterrence and strength, particularly in the light of the regional changes in the years since the Arab Spring. For Efraim Inbar, Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Israel has no choice other than to continue to live by the sword for many more years. There is a majority in Israeli society that supports this position, which is also reflected clearly in surveys, showing that a majority have more faith in Prime Minister Netanyahu than any other candidate. On the other side, Shaul Arieli, one of the prominent representatives of the Geneva peace initiative who has been involved in a number of negotiations between Israel and Palestine, argues that new diplomatic horizons have emerged for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. True, this presupposes that the Israeli government, and in particular Prime Minister Netanyahu, will have to send out unequivocal messages giving the go ahead for the two-state solution. Although there is a relative majority in the Knesset for a two­state solution, in current surveys their representatives received fewer seats than previously. Both authors are skeptical about the political conditions for a peace agreement on the Palestinian side. Arieli presupposes that Hamas would accept a two-state reality, but only as an interim solution on the way to achieving its long term goal: the liberation of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. This latest