In interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, Israeli Finance Minister and Chairman of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) Party, Yair Lapid, hinted at the possibility that Tel Aviv could talk with Hamas. The Journal took his remarks as an indication that “some in the Israeli government [are] saying for the first time that they see signs of moderation among the Islamists, and that negotiations with Hamas could one day become possible if it recognises Israel.” Lapid had told the newspaper: “It's not like it didn't happen before. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) used to be a terror organisation.” He also cited the motto used by former Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin during the Oslo talks with the Palestinians: “We negotiate for peace as if there is no terror, and fight terror as if there is no peace.” In 2008, at least, Hamas had an answer for this. “Hamas cannot recognise Israel,” Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal told Al-Ahram Weekly at the time. We had asked him about an article in The Washington Post that cited him as saying that he could accept a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders. Meshaal claimed that the newspaper had twisted his remarks. At the time, Palestinian factions were considering an Egyptian proposal to end the Hamas-Fatah rift — one that would have incorporated Hamas into the PLO and imply that it indirectly accepted negotiations with Israel. When asked about this, a number of Hamas politburo members said that Hamas would never be a party in negotiations in the name of Hamas, which was a resistance movement, and would not lay down arms until the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Some six years have lapsed since then. But in this interval, there was one notable occasion when Israel concluded a written pact with Hamas: the Egyptian brokered truce that was concluded at the time of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. Could Lapin have had this in mind? The Israeli Finance Minister began his career in journalism and the media before turning to politics. He has long been a proponent of a lasting settlement with the Palestinians on the basis of the two-state solution. Recently, however, he joined the ranks of pessimists on the prospects of Palestinian-Israeli talks. He held that the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement struck a blow to negotiations, overlooking the fact that US Secretary of State John Kerry blamed the Israelis for the breakdown in the talks, which are unlikely to resume before the end of Obama's term. Hamas was quick to respond to the Israeli minister's remarks, reiterating its stance that it would not enter into direct negotiations with Israel and would not abandon resistance. Hamas politiburo member Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a prominent Hamas hardliner on Israel, did not mince his words on this and noted that he was forever having to respond to remarks of that sort. Jackie Khouri, a Middle East affairs columnist for Haaretz, told the Weekly: “I spoke to the Palestinians about this. They did say that Hamas would enter the PLO as one of a group of parties bound by the rules and commitments of the PLO, but at the same time as a movement they would not relinquish what it does as a resistance faction.” On the other hand, Khouri, who is a Palestinian Israeli, noted that, as Mahmoud Abbas pointed out to Israeli leaders, there are people in Tel Aviv who still refuse to recognise the Palestinan Authority (PA) or the PLO, such as Naftali Bennet of the Jewish Home and other such ultra-right and conservative groups. Yet, Abbas negotiates with Israel. “In other words, it is possible to deal at the level of a government or the PA, independently of the factional context,” he said, adding that this is the context that Lapid was looking at. “He knows that there are already communications between Hamas and Israel in order to secure the truce — perhaps Egypt is a part of them — and he does not rule out the possibility of a framework for developing these contacts in the future. [Lapid] also wants to drive home the point that he and his party do not fall in the same hard-line camp as the Israeli right. But ultimately this is not the problem. The real problem is that Israel is not working for peace with any Palestinian party on the basis of the two-state solution. It always speaks of a ‘process' not a plan or a real solution that can be accepted.” In interview with the Weekly, a Hamas movement leader said: “There will not be a crisis that will obstruct the reconciliation process with Fatah, in keeping with the Cairo and Riyadh agreement. In fact, there is consensus on completing reconciliation. But Fatah had asked to postpone this until negotiations with Israel reached the end of the road, because reconciliation with Hamas would be an impediment since Israel would use this as a pretext for laying the blame for the breakdown in talks on the PA. We accepted this. There were other problems, but this question was one of them. Therefore, once the negotiations were declared a failure, moves towards reconciliation began again and the course changed. All the factions agreed that the boat was sinking on all sides and that it was time for us to come to terms. There was no justification for doing otherwise.” On the other hand, some observers believe that Hamas's loss of the Muslim Brotherhood card in Egypt was a more powerful incentive for Hamas to return to the reconciliation option. Once Fatah subsequently lost the negotiating card with Israel, both sides had nothing left to lose by resuming the reconciliation process. Once again rival political wills locked horns while the Palestinian people seethed. “There is no contradiction between reconciliation with Hamas and negotiations with Israel,” Abbas said, as all sources expected he would, and as though he would be the one to bring Hamas to the negotiating table. He added that the reconciliation was supported at the Arab and international levels and that it would strengthen the ability of the Palestinian negotiator to achieve the two-state solution. This fully consistent with the Arab Peace Initiative, the Mecca, Doha and Cairo agreements, international law and the UN General Assembly resolution of 2012 that conferred observer status to the Palestinian state as defined by pre-June 1967 boundaries. “It is all manoeuvring without sense or substance,” observed Said Okasha, Israeli affairs expert in Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, with respect to Lapid's remarks and the reactions they stirred. “The Israeli Finance Minister knows perfectly well that Hamas has an ideology that precedes its general political line — that it is a resistance movement,” he said in an interview with the Weekly. “Therefore, the notion of it entering into negotiations with Israel in the context of the settlement process does not hold water because if it did so it would lose the very justification for its existence. If Israel is responsible for the failure of talks with Fatah today, there will be nothing to offer another party in the future apart from what is being offered now, which is nothing. So what price would Hamas be willing to pay, granting the imaginary premise that Hamas would even consider the option, to be a negotiating party?”
