Former US President Jimmy Carter’s meeting yesterday with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria may come to be seen as truly historic, because for the first time an influential American personality has broken through the purblind barriers that Washington has erected around one significant section of the Palestinian people on the grounds that they are terrorists.
Carter’s explanation of why he decided to talk to Hamas and to Syria’s President Bashar Assad is quite simply that the violence will never end unless Hamas and Syria are also engaged directly in the peace process. Though he has emphasized that he is making his Middle East tour, which also brings him here to the Kingdom and to Jordan, in a personal capacity, the initiative by the 2002 Nobel Peace laureate is attracting widespread attention, some of it depressingly predictable.
The Bush White House is displeased by the Carter meeting, has said it did not want it to happen but has stopped short of attacking the former occupant of the Oval Office, who in 1979 brokered the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the one Middle East deal that has endured. It has been left to others, such as senior Pentagon advisor Bob Maginnis to suggest that Carter has breached two federal laws by meeting with “terrorists” and could have laid himself open to prosecution. This is an interesting blurring of history. When Menachem Begin came to Washington to sign the 1979 peace deal with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, nobody in America was criticizing Carter for talking to Begin. He had been the notorious leader of the terrorist Irgun gang, which murdered hundreds of Arabs, including the 120 villagers in Deir Yassin, as well as dissenting Israelis and members of the British occupation forces, who were there under a United Nations’ mandate.
Carter proved in 1979 that no dispute, however intractable, could not be solved by negotiation. The corollary was also established, which is that peace cannot be imposed by violence. In the last 29 years, Israel has discovered to its cost that the greater the violence it deploys against the Palestinians, the more vigorous and bloody becomes their resistance. The Carter talks with Hamas may very well prove to be a significant straw in the wind. Next year the Bush administration will disappear and whoever occupies the White House will have the chance to start over with a clean sheet on the Middle East peace. Even if the new president is the Republican John McCain, the opportunity will be there to stop the useless name-calling and invite everyone afresh to the negotiating table. If the incumbent is Democrat front-runner Barack Obama, there are grounds to believe that Washington’s new Middle East policy will be inclusive negotiations from the word go.
Carter’s visit has, therefore, prepared the ground for just such a new approach. This is a man who is prepared to risk the obloquy and criticism of die-hard neocons and nervous fellow senior Democrats to break the chains of Washington’s foolish Middle East peace policy. His courage and his wisdom are admirable.
