The United States and Israel have missed many opportunities for peace with Hamas | Opinions

The Biden administration's continued failure to achieve a comprehensive and lasting ceasefire in Gaza could be considered the most dire and deadliest diplomatic catastrophe of our time. The principles have been in place for weeks; Hamas agreed to the terms and conditions and endorsed the June 10 UN Security Council ceasefire resolution. Yet American deference to Israeli intransigence, even as it stubbornly blames Hamas, costs thousands of Palestinian lives.

Any close follower of U.S.-Israeli relations could have predicted this. Ironically, U.S. acquiescence to Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza has powerful roots in the last 30 years, since the beginning of the Oslo peace process in 1993. America’s unwillingness to confront its ally, to save it from itself, and to insist on a visionary path to reconciliation, has brought us to this latest precipice.

Let's travel, for example, to June 2006, when a simple American citizen named Jerome Segal left the Gaza Strip with a letter for Washington. The letter came from Ismail Haniyeh, then and now leader of Hamas. Segal, founder of the Jewish Peace Lobby at the University of Maryland, was heading to the State Department, where he would present a surprising offer.

Hamas had just been elected by the Palestinian people, exhausted and angry at the corruption of the ruling Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, and who voted for change. Haniyeh, long the leader of the Islamist opposition in Palestine, was suddenly faced with the real prospect of navigating humanitarian and economic crises, not to mention continued military pressure from Israel and a looming economic siege on Gaza. In this letter, Haniyeh sought a 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 region, Haniyeh wrote, that we do not mind having a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and proposing a truce for many years. This was essentially a de facto recognition of Israel, accompanied by a cessation of hostilities, two of the main American and Israeli demands of Hamas. The persistence of this situation, Haniyeh prophetically added, will encourage violence and chaos throughout the region.

Was Hamas serious? At the time, he was in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority to form a unity government, which suggested the letter was more than just a ruse. Haniyeh now appears to accept the concept of a two-state solution. If true, it was an astonishing concession.

It would not be unprecedented for a revolutionary militant group, considered terrorist by the United States, 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. Moreover, the Jewish militias fighting for the independence of Israel before 1948 were also described as terrorists by the British authorities. Two of them, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, became prime ministers of Israel. However, they have all traveled the path to reconciliation, even with very divergent objectives and degrees of success.

Some voices within the Israeli security establishment have endorsed engagement with Hamas. Shmuel Zakai, a former brigadier general and commander of Israel's Gaza military division, urged Israel to use the calm to improve, rather than significantly worsen, the economic situation of Palestinians in the Gaza region. [Gaza] We cannot simply deal blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they find themselves in, and expect Hamas to stand by and do nothing.

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

But you never know if Hamas really wanted to contribute to a solution. The United States did not respond to Haniyeh's letter. Instead, in 2007, he launched a covert campaign to foment a Palestinian civil war, unsuccessfully trying to oust Hamas. In hand-to-hand street fighting, Hamas fought US-backed Palestinian Authority fighters. Hamas won the Battle of Gaza and has ruled ever since. As Haniyeh predicted, violence and chaos followed, almost without interruption. In war after war, Israel pledged to destroy Hamas, but it failed.

In 2014, the Obama administration followed the same path as Bush when it rejected another deal with Hamas, which was in the midst of unity negotiations with the PA, and again accepted a deal with Israel and the the West, this one being even more accommodating than that of Haniyeh. call eight years earlier. The new reconciliation effort could have served Israel's interests, Jerusalem-based author and analyst Nathan Thrall wrote:

This allowed Hamas' political adversaries to gain a foothold in Gaza; it was formed without a single Hamas member; he kept the same Prime Minister, the deputy prime ministers, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Foreign Affairs based in Ramallah; and, most importantly, he committed to three conditions for Western aid long demanded by America and its European allies: nonviolence, respect for past agreements, and recognition of Israel.

Instead, the United States has tacitly supported Israel's divisive strategy aimed at dividing Palestinian factions and, with it, the territory itself. In a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Israel's director of military intelligence told the U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv that a Hamas victory would allow Israel to treat Gaza as a separate hostile country, and that it would be happy if PA leader Mahmoud Abbas set up a separate regime in the West Bank. Thus, the West Bank became virtually isolated from Gaza, and the dream of a corridor between the two territories within a sovereign Palestine is effectively dead.

The United States also encouraged Israeli policies to divide Palestine, weakening the dream of self-determination and making a two-state solution virtually impossible. In the past 30 years since the signing of the Oslo Accord, the settler population in the West Bank has quadrupled, hundreds of military checkpoints remain in place, and more than a dozen Jewish settlements now surround Jerusalem. East, which Palestinians still consider their capital. Yet in these three decades, no American president has wanted to hold Israel accountable by linking American military aid to ending the ongoing colonization of the West Bank. The last US official to do this was Secretary of State James Baker, during the first Bush administration in 1992. US inaction therefore allowed the expansion of Israeli settlements and the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Today, with Gaza in ruins, Hamas agreed in principle to a ceasefire on May 6 and again following the June 10 UN Security Council resolution. Reports suggest that Hamas wants to ensure Israeli withdrawal and lifting of the siege of Gaza. A senior Hamas official told Reuters that the requested changes are not significant, and Haniyeh asserted that Hamas' position was consistent with the principles of the agreement. Israel, for its part, balks, asserting, once again, that it will not stop until Hamas no longer exists. Yet none of Israel's previous promises to destroy Hamas have come to fruition. As the group's popularity grows among Palestinians, Israel's continued insistence on eliminating Hamas amounts to a fantasy to justify the ongoing massacre. US Secretary of State Blinken, during his recent trip to the region, did not exactly inspire confidence. In his June 10 remarks in Cairo, he placed all the blame on Hamas, without once mentioning the deaths of 274 Palestinians during the Israeli military operation to extract four hostages in Nuseirat.

If the Biden administration had a modicum of political vision, let alone humanity, the United States would end its acute deference to Israel, flex its muscles, and use the influence it refuses to exercise in a manner or another. What little credibility the United States retains on the international stage is at stake. Much more importantly, the lives of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza depend on it.

But with Biden's own party inviting Netanyahu to address the US Congress on the Israeli government's vision for defending democracy; with the so-called leader of the free world willingly playing a punching bag for the Israeli Prime Minister; with all the moral clarity and political logic abandoned by a Washington intelligentsia captive to pro-Israeli interests: it is perhaps too much to expect a change in behavior in the near future.

However, it must be said. It is time for the United States to stop accommodating Israel's thuggish and ruinous behavior and insist on an immediate, comprehensive and lasting ceasefire.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.

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