Hamas's non-recognition of Israel is irrelevant

Here's an article from the Financial Times also posted to the Council on Foreign Relations site. Titled The issue is not whether Hamas recognises Israel the article draws heavily on the views of "the most widely respected Israeli security expert, Efraim Halevy,"

Asked last week on Israeli television how he could justify advocating engagement with a terrorist organisation that does not recognise Israel's right to exist, Mr Halevy ridiculed the stale assumptions that underlie that question. Do not look at Hamas’s rhetoric, he said, look at what it does: Hamas declared a truce 18 months ago and has committed no terrorist acts against Israel since. In spite of Hamas’s refusal to change its theological rejection of Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister in the Hamas-led government, ordered his ministers to seek practical co-operation with their Israeli counterparts. Mr Haniyeh also confirmed that Hamas’s self-declared truce is open-ended.

Why should Israel care whether Hamas grants it the right to exist, Mr Halevy asked. Israel exists and Hamas’s recognition or non-recognition neither adds to nor detracts from that irrefutable fact. But 40 years after the 1967 war, a Palestinian state does not exist. The politically consequential question, therefore, is whether Israel recognises a Palestinian right to statehood, not the reverse.

Using Mr Halevy’s criterion of looking at what a government does, not what it says, it is clear that—its many declarations to the contrary not withstanding—Israel does not recognise a Palestinian right to statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. The position of Ehud Olmert’s government is that Israel’s right to annex at will any parts of Palestinian territory east of the pre-1967 borders supersedes any Palestinian rights. This is implicit in the Israeli government's decision that a Palestinian government that even wishes to place on the agenda of a peace negotiation the territorial changes made unilaterally by Israel in the West Bank, or the question of the Palestinian refugees, cannot be a partner for peace.

This isn't the view of one of the more intelligent sounding of the Engage contributors. A chap called John Strawson, who seems to have acquired some credibility for having lectured at Bir Zeit University, has been arguing that Ehud Olmert's lip service to a territorially contiguous Palestinian state is a reason for us all to be cheerful. At least he says not to despair. It might be a reason for zionists to be cheerful but even Blair has baulked at the idea of openly accepting Olmert's so-called" unilateralism.