It is one of the few certainties of global politics: any major initiative by a player in the Middle East conflict is inevitably viewed with deep suspicion by those on the other side of the divide.
And so it remains after yesterday's agreement in Mecca by Hamas and Fatah leaders to form a coalition Palestinian government.
The deal calls for an end to factional fighting that has killed more than 100 people in the occupied territories in recent weeks, battles that had threatened to spiral into all-out civil war.
Pro-Israel bloggers are quite clear in their sentiments, summed up by the US-based Yid With Lid site:
The sad fact is Israel is left with the status quo: two terrorist groups killing its citizens, two terrorist groups with a public goal of eradicating the Zionist entity, and a world without the guts to confront the threat of terror.
Another blog, Captain's Quarters, gives its views under the weary headline 'Haven't we heard this before?', saying:
At this point, all this agreement does is to slap fresh paint on a death machine.
Others, of course, take a different tack. The Beirut-based Daily Star paper prints an article by the Israeli academic Reuven Paz, from the multi-faith Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre.
He urges Israelis to overcome their usual suspicions for the sake of practical benefits; to, as the title of the piece says, 'Judge the Hamas movement by its deeds, not its ideology'.
The Palestinian government can only be made more practical if the local Hamas leadership can be "released from its Iranian chains", he argues:
This in turn can be accomplished by allowing Hamas to exercise its legitimate rule and by ceasing to boycott the movement. This would push the Palestinian people to encourage Hamas to adopt a more pragmatic line. The will is already there. It is the sense of siege that pushes Hamas into the arms of the hard-liners.
Time magazine, in a blog post by its local correspondent, also urges Israel not to be too hasty:
If Israel is wary of such an arrangement, it also has to take into account the Mecca Accord's profound Palestinian, Arab and Islamic dimensions. After decades of Fatah dominance and a year of Hamas rule, the deal for a national unity government now strengthens the Palestinian demand for an end to Israel's occupation.
What is even more important, however, is the fact that it was brokered by Saudi Arabia, which gives crucial Arab and Islamic support to the Palestinians.
The Jerusalem Post takes a different approach, calling the controversy over Israeli work at holy sites in Jerusalem, which exploded into violence today, "the perfect red-herring issue":
Palestinian leaders, whether from Fatah or Hamas, have been keen to find an excuse to divert attention from their internal problems. So it is not surprising that many have jumped on Israel's reconstruction of an access bridge to Jerusalem's Temple Mount ...
Such exploitation, so widely endorsed by the Palestinian leadership, is dismaying, if sadly unsurprising.
