Former UK Middle East Minister Says Peace Talks Must Begin and Include Hamas

Is Israel the obstacle to peace? A former British Middle East minister, writing in The Guardian, still thinks so: “Hamas Says It Wants Oct. 7 Massacre Again and Again… Why Won’t the Media Believe Them?,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, January 3, 2024:

In a recent op-ed in The Guardian, Peter Hain, a former UK Middle East minister, argues that while Israel is damaging Hamas militarily, it cannot hope to totally destroy it because “Hamas is a movement and an ideology that, in many respects, Netanyahu’s extremism helped to promote.”

He adds: “Rightwing Israeli governments have thwarted serious negotiations with Palestine’s more ‘moderate’ party, the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, since the Camp David summit in 2000 – more than 20 years ago. They have also consistently oppressed Gaza residents, imposing a near-constant state of siege. Is it really surprising that many Palestinians turned in desperation to an extremist alternative in Hamas?”…

Peter Hain is forgetting that military catastrophe can lead to the end of an ideology. The military defeat of Germany led to an end of the Nazi ideology’s hold over the German people. The military victory over Imperial Japan led to an end to the Japanese cult of Emperor-worship. If Hamas is reduced militarily so that its threats to Israel will be meaningless, Gazans angry at the way the terror group’s acts have led to much of the Strip being reduced to rubble may no longer follow Hamas’ ideology of total war on the “Zionist entity,” but likely rise up against the terror group’s continuing rule in Gaza.

Netanyahu first became Prime Minister in 1993, six years after the Hamas Charter appeared. Netanyahu could not have been responsible for that Charter’s contents. Nor was Hamas in any sense responding on October 7 to Netanyahu’s putative “extremism”; its operatives would have attacked Israel on October 7 no matter who was Prime Minister, including centrists Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, or even Zehava Gal-On, leader of far-left Meretz Party. And one more thing: Hamas had begun planning the October 7 attack two years ago, at a time when Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister.

Hain has his chronology backward: Hamas came to power in 2007, after having killed or expelled hundreds of its Fatah rivals. It was only after Hamas made clear it would be engaged constantly in attacks on Israel, with its goal being the complete eradication of the “Zionist entity,” that the Israelis began what Hain, and many others, erroneously call a “siege.” First, a siege implies the complete surrounding of a particular territory. But Gaza has not been completely surrounded by the IDF. It also bordered Egypt to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. The Egyptians also participated in this most imperfect “siege,” for they controlled, and still control, the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt. They open and close that crossing as they see fit.

It is not a “siege” for another reason as well. That word implies preventing all goods from entering the besieged territory. But Israel has always allowed food and medicine into Gaza, and a great many other goods besides. What has been kept out of Gaza are “dual-purpose” items that have a military as well as a civilian use: such things as cement (that can be used to build tunnels, and bunkers for fighters and weapons) and steel rods (for the network of tunnels). Even in the case of these items, Israel has allowed some amounts to enter Gaza, enough for civilian projects that have been cleared with Israel, but not any additional amounts that might be put to military use.

What Peter Hain calls the “desperation” of the Gazans that he claims led them to embrace Hamas was in fact the opposite: a triumphalist conviction that Hamas could wear down the Zionists by endless unremitting attacks. Not desperation, but determination by the terror group to continue the war against Israel whatever the cost, is what explains Hamas’ popularity. After the October 7 attacks, Hamas gained in popularity, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Every offer by Israel to make peace with the Palestinians has been rejected. In 2000, Ehud Barak, who was not the head of a “right-wing government,” made an offer to Yasser Arafat that would have given the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip, with some territorial compensation for the Palestinians from pre-1967 Israeli territory; the dismantling of most of the settlements and the concentration of the bulk of the settlers inside the 8% of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel; the establishment of the Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem, in which some Arab neighborhoods would become sovereign Palestinian territory, and others would enjoy “functional autonomy”; Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem (the Muslim and Christian quarters) and “custodianship,” though not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount; a return of refugees to the prospective Palestinian state though with no “right of return” to Israel proper. Arafat didn’t bother to give an answer; he simply walked out.

Mahmoud Abbas did the same with an offer in 2008 from Ehud Olmert. Olmert’s even more generous offer — what the PA’s chief negotiator, the late Saeb Erekat, said was in total area more than the entire West Bank and Gaza — was rejected out of hand. Olmert had wanted to retain 6.3% of the West Bank and in exchange was prepared to give Abbas 6.3% of Israeli territory, which meant that the Palestinians would end up with 20 square miles more than if Israel had given up all of the West Bank. In addition, Olmert promised to share ownership of Jerusalem, and to give the PA exclusive ownership of the Temple Mount, despite its being the holiest site in Judaism. Yet Abbas has the effrontery to claim that neither Arafat nor he, who walked out on generous offers, prevented a “two-state solution,” but that it was Israel at fault; it was Israel that, in his version of events, has come close to “destroying the two-state solution.”

In the midst of the current war, and despite their enormous losses, high-ranking Hamas officials, such as Ghazi Hamad, have proclaimed that they intend to repeat ad infinitum and ad nauseam the attacks they launched on October 7. At no time since Hamas was created in 1988 has the terror group abandoned its insistence, set down in its Charter, that Israel must be eradicated. If there is to be a “peaceful solution” to the jihad waged by the Palestinians against Israel, it will come about only if Hamas is left out altogether. It may be so weakened after this latest campaign is over that its wishes can be safely ignored, not just by Israel, but also by other Palestinians willing to negotiate a modus vivendi.

And why do people such as Peter Hain continue to be listened to with respect, and given a pulpit, when they offer only a series of easily identified and refuted errors and falsehoods?