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MIDEAST/US: Carter’s Trip Raises Tenuous Hopes

Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Apr 22 2008 (IPS) - Last week, the Washington Post published an opinion editorial written by Mahmoud Zahar, in which the Hamas foreign minister lauded “the welcome tonic” of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to bring the militant Islamist group to the negotiating table.

On the opposite page, the newspaper’s editorial team wrote a response under the headline “Zahar is a Terrorist”. While it is “one thing to communicate pragmatically,” they argued, it is “quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state.”

As Carter wraps up his controversial Middle East peace trip, where he met with Syrian and Hamas leadership in an effort to gauge their willingness for peace talks, it appears his attempts at dialogue have yielded – at least in words – more progress than the George W. Bush administration’s stillborn Annapolis initiative.

Sadly, that isn’t saying much. So what is the missing tonic in Bush’s plan?

“There is a general feeling, almost unanimously agreed, that no progress is being made in the peace talks, of any significance. As a matter of fact, since Annapolis, the peace proposals have regressed,” said Carter Monday in a speech to the Israeli Council for Foreign Relations in Jerusalem.

“The problem is not that I met with Hamas and Syria, the problem is that Israel and the U.S. refuse to meet with these people who must be involved,” he said.

The ideological wall erected by the Bush administration against “terrorists” of all stripes has witnessed cracks in recent months, as the president “runs to the finish line” (as he is found of saying) to complete a decisive Israeli-Palestinian peace by the end of his term in January 2009. Whether he likes it or not, his Annapolis “legacy” is being shaped by the actions of an Islamist party that feels it was unjustifiably cut out of negotiations.

Hamas, which is viewed as a terrorist group by Washington, claimed a shocking victory in 2006 parliamentary elections, and was subsequently boycotted by the international community for its failure to meet conditions set by the quartet of Middle East “peace makers:” recognition of Israel’s right to exist, cessation of violence, and adherence to existing peace agreements signed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

The militant group, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, seized control of Gaza from Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction last June. Each incremental step taken by the U.S., Israel, and the divided Palestinian leadership (under the control of Abbas’s Fatah) to advance Annapolis has been met with often violent reactions from Hamas. Gaza has become the scene of militant rocket attacks and Israeli reprisal raids. Israel’s blockade of the territory has plunged Gazans into a humanitarian crisis.

Speaking in Cairo last week, Carter described the blockade as an atrocity perpetuated collectively against the Gazan people: “I think that it is an abomination that this continues to go on,” he said.

The crisis appears to have in turn hardened Palestinian support around Hamas. A new poll released late last month by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (CPSP) indicates that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians supported the attack on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that left eight young men dead in March, as well as unprecedented support for the shooting of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza strip.

The 84-year old Mercaz Harav yeshiva is an ideological base for the settler movement.

The reasons, according to the poll, include: Israel’s recent military response in Gaza, which has killed nearly 130 people thus far; the blockade, which has propelled the territory to the brink of humanitarian disaster; and the announced expansion of several West Bank settlements.

The CPSP is widely considered one of the few reliable and independent indicators of Palestinian public opinion. In spite of U.S. and Israeli frustration over Carter’s meetings with Hamas, the former president’s goals appear to be more in line with a majority of Israelis, 64 percent of whom said their government must hold direct talks with the Hamas political body in Gaza toward a ceasefire and the release of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, according to poll figures collected by Tel Aviv University, and published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz this February. Less than one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks.

Calls for some form of negotiation are coming from unlikely sources. Former Israeli Mossad chief Efrain Halevy shocked the Israeli political establishment earlier this year, arguing that Israel should enter talks with Hamas simply because it is in Israel’s strategic interest to recognise the “reality on the ground”.

And on the eve of Carter’s meeting with Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal, Israeli Minister Eli Yishai, who heads the orthodox Shas party, said he was willing to meet with Hamas to discuss a prisoner exchange for the release of Shalit.

Shas, which helps form Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s parliamentary majority, is a strong advocate of the settler movement, and has made repeated threats to leave Olmert’s government over disputes in the Israeli-Palestinian talks.

Realistically, it appears that any efforts at mediation with Hamas will focus on the immediate need for a ceasefire in Gaza, to stop rocket attacks, and to lift the blockade on the territory.

But as Carter wrapped up his weekend meetings, the conflict’s narrative of tit-for-tat plodded on.

In Jerusalem, Israel’s housing ministry announced plans to build 100 homes in two settlements deep in the occupied West Bank, drawing criticism from Palestinian officials who expect the land will be part of a future Palestinian state.

In Gaza, Palestinian suicide bombers drove three explosives-laden vehicles into a goods crossing on the border with Israel on Saturday, detonating two of them. The blasts killed all three bombers and injured 13 Israeli soldiers.