Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign minister and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2006).
The problem doesn’t really lie in the nature of the interlocutor. After all, the PLO was also a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of the State of Israel when Rabin engaged in negotiations with them. The problem lies in the conditions for a historic compromise. In the eyes of most Israelis, the conditions for a negotiated settlement have remained unchanged since the days when Arafat – with the full support of current President Mahmoud Abbas – turned down President Clinton’s bold peace plan. If even the PLO could not be persuaded to agree to a compromise, what can one expect from Hamas? The reason Ariel Sharon became the embodiment of Israel’s national consensus was precisely because he shunned negotiations. The secret of his popularity lay in the fact that he replaced the discredited equation of ‘land for peace’ with a unilateralist concept of ‘land for security’. He abandoned his predecessors’ lofty dreams about a ‘New Middle East’ and ‘the end of conflict’. It is precisely here – in the departure of the Israeli political mainstream from the discourse of ‘peace’ and ‘end of conflict’ – that a surprising coincidence exists between Israel and the new rulers of Gaza and Ramallah. Neither believes that negotiations can lead to a settlement, and both favour an additional Israeli unilateral disengagement from Palestinian lands. Indeed, this would allow Hamas to claim victory for the ‘armed struggle’ without having to make any commitment on their side. Any sober analysis of the available options is bound to lead to the conclusion that the time has come to design a new approach. President Bush needs to realize that the real immediate choice in the Arab world is not between dictatorship and democracy, but between the secular dictatorships prevailing in most of the Arab countries and Islamic democracies. This by no means implies that the terrorist practices of the new Palestinian rulers and their Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel should be allowed to prevail. In these respects, the conditions need to be very strict if a Hamas government is to be allowed any international legitimacy. In practice, though, Hamas faces a terrible dilemma: while threatened with international ostracism, it urgently needs to improve the dire living conditions of the Palestinian population. It is precisely because of this dilemma that Hamas could be compelled to endorse a third way between an (unrealistic) final settlement and violent disengagement. What the PLO refused to contemplate – an interim settlement with Israel – is something Hamas would be more ready to assume. This should pave the way for Hamas to tacitly accept a third party role in converting Israel's unilateral strategy into an internationally supervised disengagement from large areas of the West Bank. Doing so would allow them to reconcile their ideological rejection of Israel with a major step towards the ‘end of occupation’. It would also gain them a vital breathing space in which to address their domestic agenda. Return to the debate homepage.
