When the former US President Jimmy Carter visited the Middle East in April 2008 he was warned against making contact with terrorist groups.
Conventional wisdom asserts that talking to terrorists would give them legitimacy. This stance, however, is now challenged from within the US political establishment. The Democrats presidential nominee Barak Obama has openly called for talks with Iran, which Washington designates as a sponsor of international terrorism.
The Arab media hailed Carter for meeting the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Masha'al, in Damascus. Carter's mission was seen as a positive step by most Arab commentators, but it contradicted US policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
Hamas is listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel and Australia. But there is more to Hamas than shelling Israeli civilians in the border town of Sderot, and conducting suicide bombings. Hamas won a democratically held election in January 2006 and formed a coalition government in the Palestinian Authority. This win came as a surprise to all, including Hamas. These election results were evidence of growing impatience among Palestinian voters with the lack of progress towards a sovereign Palestinian state.
Hamas capitalised on the growing popular resentment to gain a foothold in the political process. In a clear attempt to differentiate itself from the ruling Fatah of late Yasser Arafat, which was tainted for making repeated compromises with Israel to no avail, Hamas declared its commitment to the destruction of Israel.
This rhetoric was played down while Hamas was forced to form a coalition government with Fatah, but since the June 2007 break between the two Palestinian parties and the isolation of Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Hamas has returned to its hard line anti-Israel stance.
There is no justification for this position. It is repugnant. But surely no-one really believes Hamas poses an existential threat to the State of Israel.
So what is the way forward? Israel has tried eliminating Hamas leaders by targeted assassinations, hoping that it could cripple the organisation. The Gaza Strip is kept sealed off by Israeli forces and electricity supplies are restricted. There are daily incursions into Gazan cities by Israeli forces to take out Hamas fighters.
But no-one seriously expects these measures to defeat Hamas. That is because Hamas has gained hero status among Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world, for standing up to the might of Israel. If anything, continued Israeli assaults against Hamas only boost its popular image.
This brings up once again the uncomfortable question: what is to be done? Jimmy Carter has pointed to an alternative solution. If we accept that Hamas is not going to be eliminated from the political scene anytime soon, maybe we should be talking to its leaders and encouraging them to engage in the political process. At the end of the day, peace is not going to reign in Palestine or Israel if Hamas is excluded from negotiations.
That is an unpalatable feature of international politics: there is no room for moral judgements and ideological positions.
The United States, which has been the champion of moral outrage against Hamas terrorism and has refused to talk to its leaders, was also the state that put ideology aside in favour of Realpolitik when dealing with China. Henry Kissinger's visit to Communist China in 1971 was a watershed in Sino-US relations. This visit came less than two decades after a proxy war (with Communist China) in the Korean peninsular, and was concurrent with American military campaign in Indochina. By talking to the enemy, Washington found a way to reduce tensions in Sino-US relations and extradite the United States from Vietnam.
Ideological grandstanding has an emotive value. Both the US administration and Hamas have used it to bolster their position in relation to their constituency. But this is a dead-end policy. Unpalatable as talking to terrorists may be, Israel and the United States cannot ignore the fact that Hamas carries a popular mandate and has a tangible political objective that is enshrined in international law: national sovereignty of the Palestinian people.
LINKS:
The Carter Center
The Palestine Center
Associate Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh is Deputy Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies, University of Melbourne, and co-author of US Foreign Policy in the Middle East: The Roots of Anti-Americanism.