Should the world talk to Hamas?

This last finding suggests how much the international approach to Hamas has "backfired," Mr. Hulsman says. "This for Europeans was really the wake-up call."

The evolving European thinking was expressed publicly this month by Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, who noted a survey of Israelis showing support for talks with Hamas. "Hamas controls a very important part of the Palestinian territory, and if we want peace, we will have to involve them," he added.

In response, Israel's ambassador to Italy, Gideon Meir, told the Italian press agency ANSA, "Whoever invites us to negotiate with Hamas is actually inviting us to negotiate on the size of our coffin and on the number of flowers we want on it."

That "whoever" might now be construed to include the United States – which is encouraging Egypt to act as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas in an effort to foster negotiations that would lead to a cease-fire between the two. Also this month, the State Department posted on its Dipnote blog a "question of the week" that asked, "Should [the US] engage Hamas in the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians?"

Growing buzz in Washington

That reflects the growing buzz in Washington about the need for a new approach to Hamas. Last week, the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based organization advocating a robust US diplomatic effort to promote a two-state solution, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice concluding that reaching a settlement to the conflict – in particular by year's end, as Mr. Bush wants – "requires finding a way to bring Hamas into the process."

Some in Washington who oppose any opening up to an unchanged Hamas worry that it is indeed the Bush administration's goal of reaching an accord by the end of Bush's term that is encouraging a new approach. They see it as an unwise weakening of standards that had been placed on an organization that the US lists as a sponsor of terrorism.

The setting of a deadline is a "mistake" that is causing some in Washington and in other capitals to overlook "what kind of organization Hamas is," says Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). The international community should remember how long it took to divorce the Palestine Liberation Organization from violence, he says.

"We saw this movie in the '80s," Mr. Satloff told a WINEP forum last week.

The argument that Hamas "can't be wished away" and therefore must be dealt with "reflects a certain recognition of Hamas's ... barbarity," Satloff says, and it leads to the conclusion that "they must be accommodated."

But others say the debate over talking to Hamas is less about accommodation than about a growing realization that isolation is not a particularly effective diplomatic tool. The idea that nonengagement "is the ultimate pain we can inflict upon our enemies" is just as much "mythology" as the thinking that "engagement is the ultimate prize," which, once bestowed, will lead "the enemy [to] change," says Robert Malley, director of the Middle East program for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-headquartered conflict-prevention organization. Mr. Malley also spoke at the WINEP forum.

"We have to be modest about this issue," Malley says, who predicts that the debate doesn't mean the US will enter negotiations with Hamas anytime soon.

The "bottom line" right now, Malley adds, should be "what works, what doesn't work, and what are the alternative strategies?" In the case of the international community's approach to Hamas, he says, "The current strategy has not worked."

Previous

1 | 2