It’s not widely known that during the efforts to free the BBC journalist Alan Johnston from his miserable incarceration in Gaza, a British official traveled to Damascus to enlist the help of Khaled Meshaal, the exiled head of Hamas’ political bureau and widely regarded as the Islamic faction’s most powerful single figure.
At the end of the discussions Meshaal took the opportunity of predicting with confidence to his British interlocutor that, sooner or later, the international community would hold much wider political talks with Hamas. Why not do so soon, Meshaal asked, rather than wait for years’ more agony, deaths and hopelessness in the Middle East?
In the event the message could be delivered — unusually — in person because Whitehall temporarily waived the draconian EU-wide ban on contacts with Hamas in the interests of freeing Johnston. Sensibly so, given the crucial role — acknowledged as such, equally sensibly, by the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband — that Hamas played in securing Johnston’s release.
Meshaal’s question may not be falling on wholly deaf ears. In calling this week for engagement with Hamas — or its “moderate elements” — the cross-party British Foreign Affairs Committee is in a distinguished company, which includes from Colin Powell, George Bush’s former secretary of state, to Richard Haass, another former Bush administration official and the chairman of the US Council for Foreign Relations, and Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister.
The best bet nevertheless is that direct talks with Hamas won’t happen soon. So far at least, the international community remains locked into a United States and Israeli strategy of ignoring Hamas — and (except for emergency humanitarian aid) Gaza, currently in a state of economic collapse — while supporting, morally and financially, the emergency Palestinian leadership set up in June the West Bank by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, with Salam Fayad as prime minister, after the collapse of the short-lived “national unity government” brokered by the Saudis in Makkah and the subsequent bloody infighting which left Hamas in control of Gaza. The developments have left in place rival authorities in the West Bank and Gaza, with the international consensus behind helping the former at the expense of the latter with the stated purpose of strengthening “moderate” Palestinian elements.
But to give the “moderates” real strength, a great deal needs to happen. Israel will have to start dismantling the closures and checkpoints which have inflicted cumulative damage on the West Bank’s already stricken economy. With sober determination Fayad is seeking to neutralize Hamas in the West Bank and impose enough security to leave Israel without excuses for failing to do that.
Yet even if he succeeds, it’s hard to see how to see how Abbas and Fayad can start to become heroes to their own people without some real progress on ending the occupation and finding a permanent solution to the conflict.
Here once again the Israeli and US assumption, backed enthusiastically or not by the Europeans, still appears to be that, yes, we can talk about the “principles” of Palestinian statehood — itself an advance. But until the Ramallah leadership proves it is match fit to run a state on the territory occupied by Israel for the past 40 years, the actual establishment of one will have to wait — perhaps five years if recent comments (which Fayad said Thursday he found “disturbing”) by the new Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, are to be believed.
But let’s suppose — and the conditionals are piling up here — these formidable obstacles can somehow be overcome, perhaps with the help of Tony Blair, the new international envoy. The question of Hamas does not evaporate, a point sharply identified by Ben Ami; indeed, he has been arguing that the exclusion of Hamas — as well as Syria — from the autumn international conference planned by Bush as the climax of the present process invites them to remain in the “Iranian orbit” — to which 18 months of international boycott has increasingly consigned Hamas — and to be “spoilers” of the process, something they are all too capable of doing, perhaps through escalated violence against Israel.
But even if they hold their fire the question remains of what happens to Hamas — and by extension Gaza — in the event of real diplomatic progress. Their exclusion risks shifting Hamas’ center of gravity even further toward the hard-liners and away from the more pragmatic elements — who were in the ascendancy after Hamas’ victory in the free and fair 2006 elections, and then again after the short-lived formation of the national unity government which the US administration so despised — to the hard-liners.
Which may be one reason why Haass suggested some time ago that US officials should sit down with Hamas, “much as they have with the leaders of Sinn Féin, some of whom also led the IRA”. Haass has some locus, having been intimately involved in the Northern Ireland peace process as well as with the Middle East. And nobody, of course, knows better than Blair that in Northern Ireland recognition of its right to exist and for the militants to declare the war as over — both equivalents of the prior demands imposed on Hamas — were not required as preconditions, as opposed to outcomes, of a negotiating process.
There is nothing cuddly about Hamas. Since June’s bloody infighting in Gaza — in which it behaved with considerable brutality, some of it reciprocated by its Fatah rivals — it has restored some order in Gaza but little law. There has been repression of unfriendly media and clearly extralegal detentions and reprisals against its political opponents. This is a process that may well be accelerated if the international community continues, on advice from Washington, Tel Aviv — and, for now, Ramallah — to set its face against any form of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. Blair himself is thought by some to accept that contacts will have to happen eventually with Hamas but that they should wait until Abbas can talk from the strength the current process is supposed to give him.
For now Israel has an almost certainly clinching argument against those in Europe and elsewhere clamoring to end an international boycott which, as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee correctly said, has demonstrably failed to dislodge Hamas or change its stated ideology. And it is that — beside the obvious competence and credibility of Fayad — lifting the boycott will bring an immediate end to the current diplomacy with Ramallah.
That argument has much less power if the diplomatic momentum falters or if the Bush conference is seen to fail. But in any case, Meshaal is probably right. In the long run at least, Hamas, very much part of the problem, will also have to be part of the solution.
