By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
JERUSALEM, April 21 -- The armed Islamist movement Hamas is prepared to accept Israel as a neighbor if the Palestinian people approve the terms for peace, former president Jimmy Carter and the group's exiled leadership said Monday following a visit to the region that included seven hours of negotiations.
Carter, the most prominent Westerner to formally talk with the organization, said he secured that agreement even as Hamas rejected his proposal for a unilateral, month-long cease-fire. Hamas, which has vowed to destroy Israel, also declined to meet with an Israeli deputy prime minister who has expressed interest in discussing the fate of a captured Israeli soldier.
But Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said his trip had shown the value of negotiating with Hamas leaders, something Israel and the United States have refused to do.
"We do not believe that peace is likely, and we are certain that peace is not sustainable, unless a way is found to bring Hamas into the discussions in some way," Carter said in an address to the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations before flying back to the United States. "The present strategy of excluding Hamas and excluding Syria is just not working."
Israeli officials reacted with scorn to Carter's meetings and the agreement, saying they amounted to a propaganda coup for the Islamist group with no progress to show for it. In the past, the group has made similar declarations to the ones announced Monday by Carter and Hamas, the Israeli officials said, and has no intention of honoring them.
"It was sad to see how Hamas is using former president Carter to try to get legitimization it does not deserve," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel.
Israel's top leaders all avoided Carter during his visit, and U.S. officials criticized him for meeting with people that Washington and Israel have formally designated as terrorists.
Yossi Alpher, an Israeli political and security analyst, said that while Carter had not achieved any dramatic breakthroughs, his meetings were "symptomatic of a slow erosion in the boycott of Hamas at the international level."
In an interview, Carter, 83, said that furthering that erosion was his goal. Hamas, he said, had shown enough flexibility to make talks worthwhile, and he believed the group was no longer determined to destroy the Jewish state.
"It may be something they wish, but they know it's a fruitless concept," he said.
Carter said the group's "ultimate goal is to see Israel living in their allocated borders, the 1967 borders, and a contiguous, vital Palestinian state alongside." Carter was referring to the borders that Israel had before the 1967 Middle East war, when it captured Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In 1982, Israel completed a pull-out from the Sinai Peninsula, another conquest of that war.
Hamas's 1988 charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its officials have repeated that stand in the years since. The charter also encourages the killing of Jews.
But Carter said that in his negotiations, Hamas leaders referred to the charter dismissively as "an ancient document" and that they agreed to abide by any peace deal forged by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas if the Palestinian people approve it. That could be accomplished either through a referendum or by a vote of the legislative council.
The talks resulted in a written agreement. An English version that Carter released reads in part: "If President Abbas succeeds in negotiating a final status agreement with Israel, Hamas will accept the decision made by the Palestinian people and their will in a referendum monitored by international observers . . . even if Hamas is opposed to the agreement."
The terms, however, give the group substantial room to later back out. Hamas officials, for instance, have said that any referendum must include Palestinians living in exile worldwide -- something that could make the vote logistically impossible.
Exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who met with Carter in Damascus, told reporters there Monday that the group would not formally recognize Israel even if it accepts a peace deal that implicitly acknowledges Israel's existence.
"We accept a state on the June 4 line with Jerusalem as capital, real sovereignty and full right of return for refugees but without recognizing Israel," Meshal told reporters, referring to the borders before the 1967 war, according to the Reuters news agency. Meshal is known as one of the most militant members of the group's leadership.
At present, Gaza is the focus of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Hamas and allied groups have been using Gazan territory to launch rockets into southern Israel. The group has also staged attacks against Israeli soldiers stationed along the border. Israel conducts frequent raids inside Gaza and has imposed a tight economic blockade.
Carter, who brokered the 1979 deal that established peace between Israel and Egypt, said he was disappointed Hamas did not agree to a cease-fire, but that the group would continue trading proposals with Israel through Egypt, which is mediating. Israel does not officially acknowledge those talks.
Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas foreign affairs adviser, said the group would not sign a truce unless Israel also agreed. "It's unfair for the victim to quit defending himself and to allow the aggressor to continue killing," he said.
Hamas, which won 2006 Palestinian elections, has a factionalized leadership split among people living in Gaza and the West Bank, in exile and in Israeli prisons. While some Hamas leaders advocate an uncompromising line against Israel, others have been more willing to bargain, resulting in contradictory signals from the group about its intentions.
Monday was no exception; Carter said Meshal told him he personally favored a unilateral cease-fire, but could not achieve a consensus. Yousef, who was part of the Hamas group that met with the former president in Cairo, described Carter as brave for meeting with Hamas. "He represents the real conscience of the American people, not like George Bush and his one-sided vision for peace," Yousef said.
Bush has called for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the end of his term early next year. The United States hosted a conference in Annapolis last November to try to get the talks moving.
After meeting with Palestinian Authority officials in the West Bank, Carter said he believed that those talks have gone nowhere, and that the prospects for peace have actually "regressed."
"More settlements have been announced. More roadblocks have been established," he said. "The prison around Gaza has been tightened."
Carter said in the interview that failed talks could spark an uprising. "If you don't give people hope that their plight will be alleviated, then violence is almost inevitable," he said.
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