Middle East & North Africa / Comment
Bring in Hamas
10/03/2008 By Henry Siegman
Last October, a bipartisan group of eminent former senior government officials urged President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not to entertain the fantasy that an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord can be negotiated with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, without the participation of Hamas.
But to Bush and Rice, not to speak of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government was the preferred course of action.
The US President and his Secretary of State now face a dilemma of their own making, however. Surely after the latest violence in Gaza they can no longer deny what some critics have said from the outset, that there is no prospect of Abbas engaging Israel in successful negotiations so long as Hamas is denied participation in Palestinian governance.
You cannot make peace with half of a country’s population and remain at war with the other half. One must assume that after the latest exchanges of violence in Gaza relying on Israel’s military might to eliminate Hamas is no longer seen by Bush and Rice as a promising alternative. It is therefore time for them to heed the sober advice of the eminent persons group that urged a more nuanced policy toward Hamas.
What hope there is for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement before the two-state option evaporates depends on the United States finally screwing up the political and moral courage to use its considerable leverage with Israel and the Palestinians to return them to a path of sanity.
This article was originally published in the International Herald Tribune.
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Keywords
Conflict resolution Gaza Strip and West Bank Israel MEPP Middle East and North Africa United StatesRelated publications
Bio author: Henry Siegman
Henry Siegman is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a program of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for the past 14 years and, as of September 2006, an independent policy institute. He is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Mr. Siegman's areas of specialization include Arab-Israel relations, the Middle East peace process, U.S. Middle East policy, and interreligious relations.
