Financial Times: Hamas and peace
April 21st, 2008
One has to go the the Financial Times for editorial sense on the Carter-Hamas meeting:
Hamas and peace
Jimmy Carter, the former US president and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, has probably done more to secure Israel’s future than any man alive, as the broker of its breakthrough Camp David peace deal with Egypt in 1979. He is surely right that prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians have “regressed” since the Annapolis conference last November, when both sides undertook to negotiate a resolution to the conflict by the end of this year.
Which is why he is also right to have held two long talks last week with Khaled Meshal, the most influential leader of Israel’s most resolute and dangerous enemy: Hamas.
The Damascus talks, which led the Israeli government to snub and the US administration to decry Mr Carter, have elicited from the Islamist group its clearest indication that it could “live as a neighbour next door in peace” with Israel, provided Palestinians get their independent state on all the territories seized by Israel in the 1967 six day war.
Hamas, which won a stunning election victory against its nationalist rivals Fatah in 2006, had previously endorsed talks on the Arab League plan offering Israel full peace in return for total withdrawal from captured Arab land. Israel did not accept that offer and – with US backing and international acquiescence – moved to strangle Hamas.
The elected Hamas government faced sanctions and unrealistic demands, followed by siege after the power struggle with President Mahmoud Abbas led to Hamas’ bloody takeover of Gaza last June, and the defeat of Fatah warlords armed by the US and incited by Israel.
Mr Carter’s perception, shared by two thirds of Israelis, is that Israel cannot make war on half the Palestinian people and expect to make peace with the other half; if there is ever going to be a solution to this conflict, Hamas has to be part of it.
The Islamists must, of course, accept the existence of the Israeli state, but as the result of an agreed two-states solution; the demand that Hamas should first accept an Israel in a constant state of expansion is unreal and unjustified.
Mr Abbas has met all Israeli and US preconditions – and still they have undermined him. Within days of Annapolis Israel pressed ahead with more Jewish settlement on occupied land. The Palestinian president has nothing to show for his policy of non-violent engagement.
As a precondition for entering talks, nonetheless, Hamas must declare a ceasefire – which Israel must reciprocate – and an end to all attacks on civilians. The policy of isolating the Islamists is destructive and myopic. But there is no need to take Hamas at its ambiguous word.
Entry Filed under: Israel, Middle East, Palestine