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[quote=Anonymous]Let us travel, for example, to June 2006, when a private US citizen named Jerome Segal left the Gaza Strip carrying a letter for Washington. The letter was from Ismail Haniyeh, then and now the Hamas leader. Segal, founder of the Jewish Peace Lobby at the University of Maryland, was bound for the State Department, where he would deliver a surprising offer.

Hamas had just been elected by the Palestinian people, who had grown exhausted and angry with the corruption of the ruling, Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, and voted for change. Haniyeh, long the leader of the Islamist opposition in Palestine, was suddenly confronted with the real prospect of navigating through humanitarian and economic crises, not to mention ongoing military pressure from Israel and a looming economic siege on Gaza. In the back-channel letter, Haniyeh sought compromise.

Despite Hamas’s charter calling for the elimination of Israel, Haniyeh’s note to President George W Bush was conciliatory. “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area,” Haniyeh wrote, “that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and offering a truce for many years”.  This was essentially de facto recognition of Israel, with a cessation of hostilities – two of the key US and Israeli demands of Hamas. “The continuation of this situation,” Haniyeh added prophetically, “will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region”.

Was Hamas serious? It was at the time in negotiations with the PA to form a unity government – suggesting the letter wasn’t just a ruse. Haniyeh now appeared to accept the concept of a two-state solution. If true, it was a stunning concession.

It would hardly be unprecedented for a militant revolutionary group, considered terrorist by the US, to come to the negotiating table.  After all, the PA’s predecessor, the PLO, long carried the terrorist label, as did Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. For that matter, Jewish militias fighting for Israel’s independence before 1948 were also labelled terrorist by the British authorities – two of them, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, became prime ministers of Israel. Yet they all navigated a way to a reconciliation, albeit with sharply divergent goals and degrees of success.

A few voices in Israel’s security establishment endorsed engagement with Hamas. Shmuel Zakai, former brigadier general and commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, pressed Israel “to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians in the [Gaza] Strip… You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they are in, and expect Hamas just to sit around and do nothing”.

Another advocate for dialogue was a former director of the Mossad. “I believe there is a chance that Hamas, the devils of yesterday, could be reasonable people today,” said Efraim Halevy. “Rather than being a problem, we should strive to make them part of the solution.”

But we’ll never know if Hamas really wanted to help forge a solution. The US did not respond to Haniyeh’s letter. Instead, in 2007, it launched a covert effort to foment a Palestinian civil war, trying and failing to oust Hamas. In hand-to-hand street combat, Hamas battled the US-backed PA fighters. Hamas prevailed in the Battle of Gaza, and has ruled ever since.  True to Haniyeh’s prediction, violence and chaos has followed, almost without pause. In war after war, Israel has pledged to destroy Hamas, and failed.
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