Is it time for the west to engage with Hamas and Hezbollah?

Debate in Qatar this week between groups at heart of Middle East conflict adds weight to calls for international dialogue

• Ian Black, Middle East editor, in Doha

• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 May 2010 16.01 BST
• Article history

Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon protesting against Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2008. Photograph: Mahmoud Tawil/AP/AP

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite TV network, rarely shies away from controversy, so it was not surprising that one of the most interesting sessions at its annual forum in Doha this week was entitled: Engaging Resistance: Choice or Necessity?

Anyone who follows the Middle East knows that Resistance, with a capital R in English and the definite article in Arabic (al-Muqawama), is shorthand for two movements that operate at the heart of the region's toughest conflicts: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

To their detractors ‑ first and foremost Israel ‑ these are unreconstructed terrorist organisations. The US, UK and the EU boycott them, though Norway and Switzerland do not. Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, met the Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, this month.

Both enjoy popular legitimacy: Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections and Hezbollah has 14 seats in the Lebanese parliament, as well as an arsenal of thousands of rockets. Iran and Syria support them for reasons of principle and self-interest.

So al-Jazeera did a service by bringing their representatives together with two respected American experts, Rob Malley of the International Crisis Group and Mark Perry, an independent writer with excellent sources in the US military.

Malley argued that both movements needed to clarify their intentions about the final outcome of the conflict with Israel: did Hamas accept a two-state solution? It has signalled de facto acceptance of Israel in its 1967 borders but flatly refuses to recognize it formally; it refuses to abandon violence but is capable of maintaining ceasefires and has offered a long-term hudna, or truce. It is also vague about its charter, which contains unambiguously antisemitic passages.

Osama Hamdan, in charge of Hamas's foreign relations, responded by urging the US to stop treating Israel as a strategic asset, stop relying on "agents" (Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority) and to get over its aversion to dealing with Islamists. Ibrahim Moussawi of Hezbollah said given the choice between resistance and compromise, resistance was the obvious option. "When we face aggression," he said, "we have to defend ourselves."

Both proudly listed the achievements of their "asymmetric" struggle against Israel. Hezbollah is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its greatest victory ‑ Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. Other landmarks include Ariel Sharon's unilateral "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the 2006 Lebanon war and last year's Cast Lead offensive, with all their human and material losses to a technologically superior enemy.

Both are implacably opposed to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which first under Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas abandoned armed struggle for negotiations, resistance for diplomacy. Negotiations have been going nowhere, slowly and sporadically, for 17 years while Israeli settlements in the West Bank have more than doubled.

Prospects for the US-brokered "proximity talks" between Israelis and Palestinians range from slim to hopeless. But, as Malley pointed out, US and western support for the PA, combined with the siege of Hamas-controlled Gaza, means that any opening to Hamas would infuriate Abbas and Israel. Hamdan hit back by accusing the Americans of seeking to block any hopes ‑ admittedly slender ‑ of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

Still, not everything is set in stone. There was a sign of movement on the Lebanese front last year when the British government recognised what it called the political wing of Hezbollah. Obama's terrorism adviser, Jim Brennan, talked recently of strengthening "moderate elements" in the movement.

In European countries there are regular calls for dialogue with Hamas and warnings that it cannot be excluded from any peace process. This is no fringe position: advocates in the UK include establishment figures as weighty as lords Patten and Ashdown and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former ambassador to the UN.
Al-Jazeera's framing of the "engagement" question this week implied that talking to the Resistance was a necessity. Perry, his finger on the pulse of debates inside the US military and the Obama administration, predicted that Mashal and Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah would one day find a US envoy knocking on their doors. But for that to happen the Palestinians and Lebanese will need to answer the questions their representatives ducked in Doha. Simply affirming ‑ and exercising ‑ their right of resistance will not be enough.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian