WASHINGTON: Sources close to the US President-elect Barak Obama say the new administration will likely open a channel of communication with Hamas.

According to The Guardian newspaper, three sources within Obama’s foreign policy team favor talks on a nondiplomatic level, possibly through American intelligence officers operating in the region.

Direct talks with the Palestinian political group are a departure from an isolationist policy advocated for the past eight years by President George W. Bush. Many Middle East experts say the move is long overdue.

“I am hoping Obama will really do that. You have to be able to make contact with the other side,” says Sherifa Zuhur, author of an influential paper published by the US Army War College that advocates open communication between the US and the Palestinian opposition group. “I have been arguing this with people in the army who see things in black and white, and are uncomfortable when faced with any sort of negotiation ‘without terms.’ The truth is, you have to be able to negotiate within some set of terms.”

Zuhur says the long-held American view that “you don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an unreasonable diplomatic stance that has been forced upon US policy-makers by “Israel and the Israeli lobby.”

She amplifies this concern in “Hamas And Israel: Conflicting Strategies Of Group-Based Politics,” the groundbreaking paper that — like Jonathan Alter’s “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” and “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin — is being closely read by members of Obama’s inner circle.

“Israel’s stance toward the democratically elected Palestinian government headed by Hamas in 2006, and toward Palestinian national coherence — legal, territorial, political, and economic — has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking,” Zuhur writes. “The reasons for recalcitrant Israeli and Hamas stances illustrate both continuities and changes in the dynamics of conflict since the Oslo period (roughly 1994 to the Al-Aqsa intifada of 2000). Now, more than ever, a long-term truce and negotiations are necessary. These could lead in stages to that mirage-like peace, and a new type of security regime.”

Zuhur says that much of what happens between Hamas and the Obama administration will depend on the outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections.

She believes the recent military action taken by Tel Aviv against Gaza is “a card they are playing” to ensure that they are re-elected.

However, Zuhur is worried that the media and politics within the Obama staff may derail US-Palestinian talks. “The war Israel is waging against Palestine is very asymmetric. Just look at the casualty figures on each side. Yet the press is treating it like it a symmetrical war.... And just look at who is running the White House: Chief of Staff-designee Rahm Israel Emanuel, a dual US-Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli Army, and Secretary of State-designee Hillary Clinton, who has made no secret of her pro-Israeli views... I very much wish that news of these talks are true.”