Carter was Right But Bush, Media Ignore Hamas' Overtures Towards Peace

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2008.

Here is some recent news from Israeli and Arab sources that you might have missed:

Haaretz reported that "Hamas' political leader Khaled Meshal said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along Israel's pre-1967 borders, and would grant Israel a 10-year hudna, or truce, as an implicit proof of recognition if Israel withdraws from those areas."

According to Gulf News, "Former US president Jimmy Carter said that exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal had told him the movement would accept a peace deal if it was approved in a Palestinian vote. ... Hamas will accept a ceasefire that is limited to the Gaza Strip, dropping its long-standing demand that the West Bank be included in any halt in fighting with Israel, senior representatives of the group said."

Haaretz also noted that "the most significant change in Hamas' stance in the talks over a calm is that it gave up on its demand that the calm extend to both Gaza and the West Bank. This may lead to a breakthrough, but if Israel refuses this offer, Hamas will continue its policy of the past few weeks ¬ escalating the violence and rocket fire."

Israel did refuse this offer, in such a quiet low-key way that it seemed Israel simply ignored the it, along with other olive branches tentatively offered by Hamas in the wake of Jimmy Carter's talks with Hamas leaders. The U.S. government and our mainstream media did much the same (though the New York Times belatedly let Carter publish an op-ed column). What could have been heralded as a new opening toward peace in the Middle East has instead been expunged from the discourse, flushed down the memory hole into the oblivion of official nonexistence.

That's nothing new. For years, Hamas leaders have periodically offered truces and talked publicly of peace, negotiation, and compromise. Every time, they get the same kind of silent treatment -- for tactical, geopolitical, and ideological reasons.

On the tactical level, Israel and the U.S. want to isolate Hamas and treat it as a political nonentity, hoping that the Palestinian people will eventually, out of desperation, shift their political support to the more pliable Fatah regime of Mahmoud Abbas. It's a risky strategy because it could so easily backfire. If the Israel-Fatah peace talks end with no result -- as most experts now predict -- an unpredictable number of Palestinians will give up on Fatah and rally around Hamas.

But Israeli and U.S. leaders see no choice. They are committed to pursuing a peace agreement that will create a weak Palestinian state. Only Fatah offers even a chance of that outcome. Why a weak state? That leads to the geopolitical reason for ignoring Hamas' peace offerings.

If the U.S. or Israel were to respond publicly to Hamas moves, they would tacitly acknowledge that Hamas is a significant player in the game, that it does have some political power. "The world's only superpower" and its "most reliable ally" are determined to hide this truth at all costs. Being a superpower means keeping up the illusion that you have all the power, that you can do whatever you damn please. Of course the illusion has been punctured in the streets of Iraq and the hills of southern Lebanon. But that's all the more reason to try to keep it up everywhere else, especially in the resource-rich Middle East. To allow a Palestinian state with genuine political and economic power to exist would raise the specter of "instability" -- the foreign policy elite's code word for anything that compromises U.S. power and influence.

Moreover, U.S. and Israeli leaders have insisted on linking Hamas with all the other Islamist forces resisting their hegemony over the Middle East. To grant Hamas any semblance of power would create the impression that the Islamists as a whole were on the rise. So it seems imperative to disempower Hamas by any means necessary.

And ignoring people can be an even more persuasive display of power than shooting them. Shooting signals to the world that the victims matter, and that signal in itself makes the victims significant players in the power game. Ignoring them says to the world that the victims are irrelevant: No one needs to respond to, or even listen to, anything they say.

These well-known power considerations are bolstered by an ideologically loaded narrative about Hamas that is equally familiar.

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Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

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