The damage done by talking to Hamas

Michael C. Kotzin
chicagotribune.com

Former President Jimmy Carter's freelance meetings with Hamas in April raise the question of whether official meetings with this group are wise or desirable. In fact, such a change in U.S. policy would be harmful to Palestinians and detrimental to the establishment of peace between the Palestinians and Israel. It also would be a destabilizing factor in the Middle East and damaging to America's global interests. Designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and the European Union, Hamas defines itself through a motto that says: "Jihad is its methodology, and death for the sake of Allah is its most coveted desire." Consistent with those principles, Hamas made suicide bombing a tactic of choice and deflected potential progress in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.

Though agreements reached through that process committed Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to disarm Hamas and other militias, that was never done.

Meanwhile—thanks in great part to the corruption and failures of Arafat and his Fatah cronies—Hamas was able to gain political standing after being allowed to participate in Palestinian Authority elections even without honoring the principles on which that authority was based. Hamas subsequently initiated a mini civil war and gained total control of the Gaza Strip.

Using that base to carry out rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel, Hamas has positioned itself as a spoiler in the peace process in which Israel and the Fatah-led West Bank-based Palestinian Authority are now re-engaged and it threatens to make matters worse. While cynically abusing Gaza residents to score propaganda points, Hamas leaders use mosques, schools and mass media to indoctrinate them with a profound hatred of Israel and the Jewish people—a hatred consistent with the extremist anti-Semitism that permeates the Hamas charter. By those means and in turning to the Iranian regime for weapons and training, Hamas has helped bring the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and the Middle East, to its current tenuous stage.

This is the context in which calls for talking with Hamas have emerged, as though it is merely one more nationalist, political group and as though such talks could lead its officials to soften their stand and enter the peace process. Such a view of Hamas and the possibilities connected with talks is sharply at odds with the prevailing reality.

Hamas came into being and continues to function as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group founded in Egypt where it is outlawed as a subversive threat to the secular government. As a religious entity, Hamas does not perceive the conflict with Israel as one between national bodies engaged in a dispute over territory that could be resolved via a compromise which would see two separate states existing side by side. In a charter that calls for "raising the banner of Islam on every inch of Palestine," in its recurring rhetoric and actions, Hamas repeatedly makes clear that it utterly rejects such a solution.

For Hamas, this is a religious conflict with only one acceptable outcome. It will be resolved only via a fight to the finish, to the "last hour" when "the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them."

As that passage from Hamas' charter demonstrates, the particular religious position in which Hamas is rooted is a radical Islamist one. Hamas' long-standing link to the Muslim Brotherhood is highly relevant here.

And so is its developing link to Iran, which is committed to spreading Islam and advancing its own hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and beyond, with the destruction of Israel that Iranian leaders repeatedly call for basic to those goals.

American talks with Hamas at this time would enhance that organization's credibility and elevate its status while weakening the moderate secular nationalists within the Palestinian body politic with whom resolution of the conflict with Israel might be possible. They would also endanger the Palestinian Authority's hold on the West Bank.

Additionally, they would encourage Islamist radicals throughout the Muslim world who threaten American interests, jeopardizing the stability of Egypt, Jordan and other secular nation states.

Given its identity and raison d'etre, Hamas is not going to be changed by public talks with the U.S.

Rather than wishing we could somehow bring Hamas into a peace process that is anathema to it, the U.S. should strive to see the group weakened militarily and marginalized politically. Behavior like that of Jimmy Carter—whose talks failed to deliver the key results he claimed for them—only helps to bolster Hamas' standing while sending very harmful messages to friends, allies and adversaries.

Michael C. Kotzin is the executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.