Meet the boogeyman

Al Jazeera's recent interview with Khaled Mesha'al, head of Hamas' political bureau and a traditional hard-liner within the movement, is well worth a watch.

The money quote: "Now we have a vision: we accept a state on the 1967 borders."

The key point here is that Hamas is not the ideologically inflexible, politically extremist organisation painted by the mainstream media. There are areas where real progress could be made. It is certainly possible that, if it came down to it, the above would be exposed as mere rhetoric and Hamas would reject the standard two-state settlement. Hamas experts disagree, recognising important ideological shifts within the movement in recent years, but it is impossible to predict for certain what would happen. The way to find out, as Mesha'al said, is to test them.

A U.S. and Israel sincerely interested in peace would have jumped at chances to bolster the moderates within Hamas and to engage in dialogue with the organisation. Instead, opportunities  for political progress - Hamas' unilateral 18-month ceasefire, its 2005 electoral platform, the Prisoners' Document,  the Mecca Agreement, and so on - have been systematically undermined through rejectionism and violence. Israel and the U.S. saw signs of moderation by Hamas not as opportunities to be welcomed but as developments to be feared. For Israel, the threat posed by Hamas is primarily political, not military. Faced with the prospect of a credible Palestinian organisation that might well agree to a genuine two-state settlement, insisting on terms (such as a full Israeli withdrawal and a dismantling of Israeli settlements) unacceptable to Israel, the U.S. and Israel moved to crush this threatened Palestinian 'peace offensive' through economic strangulation and military force. It is undoubtedly the case that there exist within Hamas more extreme elements that would reject most of the above. For a while, the moderates within the movement appeared to have the upper hand - Hamas increasingly shifted its focus from the military to the political sphere, and adopted a platform far closer to Fatah's than it was to the movement's 1988 Charter. Sadly, U.S./Israeli policy has served, consciously, to undermine them at the expense of the radicals. However, opportunities still clearly exist for constructive engagement with Hamas, and we must ensure that the U.S. and Israel take them before it is too late.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander