To date Hamas is a terrorist organisation so far as most Western countries are concerned. No matter than everyone agrees that it was democratically elected in Gaza.
No one is talking to Hamas. Sooner or later they will have to!
Interesting that Time, perhaps of all publications, has an interview with Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas leader.
As writer Joe Klein says:
"Hamas has some inconvenient facts in its favor: it exists, it remains strong in Gaza — as a direct consequence of the real social services it provides and its relative lack of corruption compared with Fatah — and it has a legitimate complaint. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is inhumane and outrageous. Palestinians are imprisoned behind a barrier wall that does not conform to the 1967 lines; they are forced to endure hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks whose purpose seems humiliation as much as security; their lands are slit by highways that only settlers are allowed to use; the settlements, populated by the most extreme Israelis, have doubled in size since the 1993 Oslo accords, gradually turning the Palestinian areas into Swiss-cheese cantons.
There will be no peace as long as this persists. And there will be no peace without Hamas as part of the process, as odious as its continuing embrace of violence against innocents may be. And there will be no process if the U.S. doesn't speak to all sides. In the past, the Middle East peacemakers, more often than not, have been the former terrorists — on both sides. Why not now?"
No one is talking to Hamas. Sooner or later they will have to!
Interesting that Time, perhaps of all publications, has an interview with Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas leader.
As writer Joe Klein says:
"Hamas has some inconvenient facts in its favor: it exists, it remains strong in Gaza — as a direct consequence of the real social services it provides and its relative lack of corruption compared with Fatah — and it has a legitimate complaint. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is inhumane and outrageous. Palestinians are imprisoned behind a barrier wall that does not conform to the 1967 lines; they are forced to endure hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks whose purpose seems humiliation as much as security; their lands are slit by highways that only settlers are allowed to use; the settlements, populated by the most extreme Israelis, have doubled in size since the 1993 Oslo accords, gradually turning the Palestinian areas into Swiss-cheese cantons.
There will be no peace as long as this persists. And there will be no peace without Hamas as part of the process, as odious as its continuing embrace of violence against innocents may be. And there will be no process if the U.S. doesn't speak to all sides. In the past, the Middle East peacemakers, more often than not, have been the former terrorists — on both sides. Why not now?"
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