Make room for Hamas in the peace process

Wayne White

WASHINGTON, DC - Any meaningful Israeli-Palestinian peace effort cannot exclude or ignore Hamas. If the process is to have a chance of achieving a meaningful conclusion, Hamas must be brought in, regardless of the potential drawbacks of such inclusiveness.

After so many years of disappointment, it would be preferable to risk failure than to proceed with an incomplete peace process, flawed from the outset by only partial Palestinian participation. That exclusionary approach would virtually guarantee vigorous and violent opposition from an excluded Hamas, resulting in almost certain collapse.

Western calls for democratization in the Arab world have been tainted by the West’s rejection of the 2006 Hamas electoral victory, regardless of how undesirable that outcome may have been. Yet Hamas’ victory was predictable: polling over the past 10 years has shown that the Arab public tends to be more anti-Israeli, anti-American and more Islamist than most Arab leaders, despite the recent positive bounce from the so-called “Obama factor”. As a result, it should have come as no surprise that the isolation of Hamas by Israel and the West has proven fruitless and is unlikely to cause Hamas to buckle to Western demands.

President Barack Obama is well-positioned to depart from past policy toward Hamas. With Washington in the lead, the international community, including Israel, could enter into a limited truce, or hudna, with Hamas, according it no permanent legitimacy, only a role in the peace process for the duration of useful engagement. This would include a temporary end to Gaza’s isolation from outside aid and trade – excluding military aid – as a further incentive to cooperate as fully as possible.

Security would again be critical to the success of any quest for a settlement. Unfortunately, some elements in both the current right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas would doubtless welcome failure on the security front as a convenient means of killing or stalling the process. There must, therefore, be a robust American effort to assess the motives and behaviour of both sides.

Some violations are to be expected from the Palestinian side, as history has shown in almost every attempt to negotiate peace in this conflict. Nonetheless, if intelligence indicates these incidents are relatively isolated and the acts of rogue elements, the posture of Hamas proper should weigh heavily in any response, so long as the majority in Hamas is acting in good faith. Compliance cannot be viewed one-dimensionally: intelligence must sort out the sources of violence as well as the attitude toward violence within Hamas’ leadership and its rank and file. In the end, one would hope that with the bulk of Hamas inside the tent and presumably cooperating on security, the violence associated with most determined efforts aimed at peace would be more limited this time around.

Similarly, Israel’s response to any violence must be monitored. Harsh or provocative responses to isolated incidents, or responses that target civilians or Hamas elements unassociated with violence, should be judged harmful to the process as well.


This approach would not be an easy one, especially with respect to monitoring Hamas. American intelligence could never be sufficiently comprehensive and detailed to draw firm conclusions in every single incident. As a result, trends and long-term intentions must play into this calculus, not merely analysis of what happens on an incident by incident basis. The cooperation of both sides in fleshing out the intelligence picture would be important, and the quality of that cooperation considered when assessing the sincerity of Hamas.

Nonetheless, a peace process accepting Hamas as a partner to the Palestinian effort would be a real challenge for the United States, the West and Israel. Whether Israelis – especially this Israeli government – could accept a more flexible approach toward security is also uncertain.


We must bear in mind that regardless of what Hamas says or tells interlocutors now, it is only amid the pressure of actual talks that the international community would be able to determine the movement’s, and the Palestinians’, ultimate bottom line, something absolutely vital to a truly meaningful peace process.