Hamas and the two-state solution: villain, victim or missing ingredient?

Zuhur, Sherifa ; Abunimah, Ali ; Malka, Haim 等

The following is an edited transcript of the fifty-second in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on Friday, April 11, 2008, in the Gold Room of the Rayburn House Office Building with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., presiding.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.: president, Middle East Policy Council

Today's topic is very timely. "Hamas: Villain, Victim or Missing Ingredient?" Obviously, this is a question that is crucial for peace in the Holy Land and, more broadly, in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the core issue that radicalizes the region and energizes anti-Americanism into terrorism in the broader Islamic world. So there's a great deal at stake.

Many see Hamas as a pure villain. It has been branded by Israel, the United States and some others as a terrorist organization rather than a legitimate movement for Palestinian independence or resistance against occupation. It is widely seen as extremist; yet, in many instances, it has shown principled and disciplined restraint.

This is an organization that is Islamist, Sunni Salafi in orientation. Is it morally absolutist or is it, as it claims, a democratic party that is prepared to accept electorally determined alternation in office? It won the Palestinian elections rather decisively and remains very popular, but it is seen in neighboring countries--autocracies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia--as a major threat, in that it appears to unite Islamism and democracy. It does not accept Israel's right to exist, but it does accept that Israel does exist and has repeatedly stated that it is willing to deal with Israel.

Is Hamas, the elected government of the Palestinians, a victim? It has been assiduously isolated and sought to be overthrown by Israel and the United States. It has, oddly for a Sunni Islamist movement, been driven into the arms of Iran, having nowhere else to go. It is now the subject of a siege in Gaza, with many implying that the siege will soon blossom into a full-scale war. In any event, Hamas's ascendancy as an elected government in Gaza has been accompanied by new extremes in suffering for the Palestinian people.

Is Hamas the missing ingredient in peace? Can a peace process that excludes the elected majority government of Palestine work, or is it dead on arrival? If llamas is not included somehow in whatever peace may eventuate, will it not have the capacity to wreck that peace? By what right do those who are not elected claim to speak for and negotiate on behalf of Palestinians?

These are not easy questions, and they are all in play. Former President Jimmy Carter is preparing to go to Damascus next week to meet with the exiled leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who may in fact have quite different views than some of the Hamas people within Palestine. There was a theory that the two parts of the movement are not in sync and that they may be pursuing different agendas. This raises, finally, the question of the role of Hamas more broadly in the very large Palestinian diaspora, whose acquiescence in any peace must also be obtained if it is to be secured.

SHERIFA ZUHUR: research professor of Islamic and regional studies, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College; director, Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Diasporic Studies

I'm expressing my own views and not those of the Army or the Department of Defense.

The Movement of the Islamic Resistance--Hamas--reflects the unique circumstances marking the Palestinian experience, namely, Palestinians' lack of sovereignty, the occupied territories' Bantustan status, the deplorable condition of the Palestinian refugee communities throughout the Middle East, and the factionalization of their leadership. It is also one of the Palestinian responses to the Islamic awakening or revival that took place throughout the Muslim world. I will reflect on certain continuities in Hamas's history, but I will also point out that the movement has evolved and has been very flexible indeed.

Emerging from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Hamas bears all the hallmarks of the Muslim Brothers, or Ikhwan, who call for dawah, reform, an Islamization of society, adala, social justice, and hakmiyya, the sovereignty of God, which can only be realized through the sharia. And like all Ikhwan, they accept any Muslim who calls himself or herself a Muslim. In other words, they are not a Takfirist group. They are not like al-Qaeda; they are not like the Daghmoush-led Islamic army in Gaza and some other smaller groups. They do aim for consensus; they do have and have always had a democratic process in their organization intended to inhibit factionalism. They are pragmatic. They have avoided conflict whenever possible with countries other than Israel, meaning non-interference in the internal politics of those countries. It hasn't always been possible.

Hamas both embodied the vision of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brothers, of an Islamic populist movement, and developed a revolutionary Palestine-first approach. So whatever its relationship has been to the political process, it has set about serving the economic, social, spiritual and political needs of the Palestinians and those of prisoners, a very large segment of the Palestinian population.

Some questions arose about Hamas. Why is it that modern Islamism belatedly emerged among Palestinians? This really has to be answered by looking at the Arab nationalist orientation of the PLO and the control that Egypt, Jordan and Israel exerted over religious institutions and discourse. Certainly, Egypt tried quite hard to destroy the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brothers, who were jailed, or exiled, or living underground. By the 1960s, they had very little prestige in Gaza. And the strong personality shaping the organization, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and educator, returned from Egypt to Gaza and decided to focus on his own field, education, and to create in it a response to the spiritual and psychological devastation of the Palestinian community after 1967.

He really faced an uphill task. The Ikhwan of the West Bank were, if anything, perceived even more negatively than the Ikhwan of Egypt. So Yassin's efforts in the Islamic society and later in the organization called the Mujama al-Islami were deemed nonpolitical by the Israeli authorities, who licensed these groups (then withdrew and reinstated the license). That was serendipitous for him, but the policy had its background in the Israelis' prior devastating destruction of Islamic institutions and education within the Green Line, and some contrasts, so long as organizations were nonpolitical, in the West Bank and Gaza. While providing social, economic and medical aid, he and his supporters tried to awaken an Islamist vision through the printing and distribution of segments of Sayyid Qutb's book, Fi Dhil al-Quran. Maybe you've heard of Maalim f-il-Tariq, which was Qutb's more pessimistic, later book. This book is a remarkable, elevated discussion of the artful holistic meaning of the Quran (fann al-Quran).

As this happened, a lot of other things were going on. Both in Egypt and Kuwait, young Islamist Palestinians began to disengage from the other Palestinian nationalist groups and form their own organizations. This also happened later abroad, in the UK and elsewhere, providing a much-needed layer of external leadership. In Gaza, the Ikhwan were able to increase their presence in many mosques and began the project of the Islamic University, the first institute of higher learning in Gaza, where this pattern of rivalries with Fatah and manipulation by Yasser Ararat was very much in evidence. This type of endeavor--student parties in Palestinian universities and secondary schools--was very important to Hamas's mobilization and growth throughout the '80s.

According to insiders in the organization, the group began planning for armed resistance long prior to the first intifada, but they knew they weren't ready. They began facing competition with another new group, Islamic Jihad. When the intifada began, Hamas announced its existence and proclaimed jihad as the vehicle for liberation. That was really novel and a complete break with the Muslim Brothers' policy at that time. This was a period of trial and error for the organization; arrests by the Israelis, in 1988 and 1999 particularly, caused its leadership from then on to be mostly directed from outside. The real outcome of the intifada was a profound uncertainty and existential crisis for Hamas, because it caused the Arab governments and the PLO to seek resolution in Madrid and then in Oslo.

In the Oslo period, the group had a mixed experience. The deportation of 413 Hamas members to Lebanon in 1992 actually boosted the group's legitimacy, as did the Meshal affair, when the Israelis tried to poison Hamas's leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan, and Sheikh Yassin's tour of the Arab world. At the same time, Hamas faced virulent opposition from the PLO because Israel demanded that the PLO contain Hamas. This was aggravated by a number of incidents testing Hamas's generally stated philosophy that it is a fraternal organization, that ultimately it does seek reconciliation with Fatah. After all, they have basically the same aim, which is to alleviate the Palestinian situation.

In the Oslo period, Hamas grew many services and attracted many educated groups to join it, for example, an entire women's movement. Then, with the second intifada and Hamas's increased actions against the Israelis and the inter-Palestinian strife and corruption prior to the elections of 2006, Palestinians looked to Hamas as an antidote for everything that was going wrong.

Its seemingly contradictory statements about a political solution are similarly rooted in its history. It has, at many different times going back to 1988, offered a truce to Israel, an interim peace, but at the same time its discourse also concerns an ultimate solution, meaning a solution to the situation of both 1948 and 1967 Palestinians. There are members who support a two-state solution and members who do not. Many people say that the issue of negotiation with Israel is possibly modifiable by popular referendum (because Hamas would not stand in the way of the popular will), but that a solution cannot exclude the rights of refugees or the status of Jerusalem.

AMB. FREEMAN: In Saudi Arabia when I arrived as ambassador in 1989, the Saudis were severely restricting donations to Hamas on the grounds that it was a Shin Bet (Israeli internal security) front. And you reminded us that, in fact, the Israelis had a role in the beginning in facilitating, if not sponsoring, the growth of llamas in order to build a kind of religious firebreak against the secular PLO. That's a great irony for which I hope heads have rolled in Shin Bet; it didn't work out too well.

This brings me to the point that you mentioned, the attempted assassination of Khalid Meshal in Jordan with a biological agent. I think it was the first time that biological warfare on an individual level had been practiced, and Prime Minister Netanyahu had to apologize and provide the antidote to save his life. This illustrates another point: it is hard to get a life insurance policy if you're a Hamas politician. I mention this because, if you go on the Middle East Policy Council website, you will find interviews with a fairly large number of Hamas leaders, all of whom are now dead. Over the years, we have interviewed them through professional interviewers, and I'm sorry to say that, essentially without exception, they've all since been murdered.

ALI ABUNIMAH: fellow, Palestine Center; journalist; founder, Electronicintifada.net

I also am speaking for myself and not for any organization. But I would like to acknowledge and thank the Palestine Center, where I'm a fellow, for their support, which allows me to do my research.

I just returned two days ago from a visit to Jordan and Lebanon. I wasn't able to go to Gaza, but since I was in the area, I wrote to a friend of mine in Gaza just to see how he was doing and to tell him that I wished I could be there. He replied with a few lines that I want to share to you. He is an academic and a peace activist born and raised in Gaza:

 Dear Ali, it's so nice to hear from you and know that you are just
 around the corner. I really wish you could visit us here in Gaza. I
 know that it is wishful thinking, but one day we will see each
 other in person. I don't need to tell you how bad it is here.
 Things have deteriorated so rapidly. In addition to all the
 shortages you know about, now we have no fuel. The last time I
 drove my car was two months ago. I really don't know what more is
 needed for the international community to intervene; how many more
 dead bodies, I wonder. Anyway, my friend, they will not break our
 spirit.

It's so easy to forget that we are talking about entire human communities, cities, people, and it is hard to talk about solutions when the freedom to travel, to dialogue, to exchange ideas is so restricted. Thus the importance of events like this in allowing us to begin to break taboos.

Since Hamas won the legislative elections in the occupied Palestinian territories in January 2006, the United States has attempted to isolate the movement in Gaza while propping up the leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his electorally defeated Fatah faction in Ramallah, in the hope of reversing the election result and restoring Fatah to power. This has fit in with an overall U.S. strategy of fostering so-called moderate regimes in the region. These are regimes that are not defined by any democratic or human-rights criteria; they simply are allied with the United States and dependent on it to a greater or lesser extent. And the United States is, at the same time, determined to confront indigenous forces such as Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the United States portrays not as indigenous movements with deep social roots, but merely as puppets of regional rival Iran.

This strategy has backfired spectacularly. Hamas has withstood an extraordinary military, economic and political campaign waged against it by Israel with the encouragement of the United States. After Hamas's breach of the border wall with Egypt last January, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to obtain basic supplies, Hamas is arguably more popular than ever. Meanwhile, the U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations between Israel and Abbas's U.S.-recognized Palestinian Authority have gone nowhere. There is a growing realization that the policy has failed and must change, but as to how it must change, the discussion is only beginning.

Within weeks of the January 2006 election, Israel and the Quartet--the ad hoc group representing the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations--had agreed to the complete isolation of Hamas unless it met certain conditions: renounce armed struggle, recognize Israel's main political demand that it has a fight to exist as a Jewish state, and agree to abide by all signed agreements. No reciprocal conditions were imposed on Israel, which did not have to recognize Palestinian political demands a priori, was free to continue military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied territories, and could violate signed agreements with total impunity.

It appears that these conditions were specifically tailored to be unacceptable to Hamas. The United States, in collaboration with Israel and elements of the Fatah leadership in Ramallah, put in place a siege to squeeze Hamas and the civilians in Gaza in the hope that the population would turn against Hamas and back to Fatah. The United States also sponsored what amounted to an attempted coup against Hamas by Contra-style militias. This provoked Hamas's complete takeover of the interior of the Gaza strip in June 2007. By now, I'm sure many of you have read "The Gaza Bombshell" in April's Vanity Fair, which details the background to this coup attempt.

This setback has prompted the United States to support even greater pressure on Hamas while trying to prop up Abbas and his PA with more military and economic aid. In short, I think this will fail. I would argue that the only solution is indirect and direct engagement with Hamas.

One of the common claims of Israeli and other opponents of such engagement is that Hamas is an irrational jihadist organization with no identifiable or satiable political goals other than the destruction of Israel, as almost every newspaper article repeats whenever the name of Hamas is mentioned. However, Hamas is, as Dr. Zuhur pointed out, a complex, dynamic and diverse movement whose leadership has set its sights on a nationalist political strategy that cannot succeed without engagement with the group's adversaries, including Israel. The group's pragmatism, in this sense, has been demonstrated by the numerous hudnas, or cease-fires, that it has repeatedly adhered to and negotiated with Israel through intermediaries, including the current one that is more or less holding now. And, of course, its election platform did not mention anything about the destruction of Israel.

In my remaining few minutes, I want to talk about a model that some Hamas leaders have put forward that I think should be seized on. This was put forward in an op-ed in The New York Times on November 1, 2006, by a senior Hamas adviser, Ahmed Yousef, in the Gaza Strip. He says the following:

 Here in Gaza, few dream of peace. For now, mostly they only dream
 of a lack of war. It is for this reason that Hamas proposes a
 long-term truce, during which the Israeli and Palestinian peoples
 can try to negotiate a lasting peace. A truce is referred to in
 Arabic as a hudna. Typically covering 10 years, a hudna is
 recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding
 contract. A hudna extends beyond the Western concept of a
 cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a
 permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences....

 Whereas war dehumanizes the enemy and makes it easier to kill, a
 hudna affords the opportunity to humanize one's opponents and
 understand their position with the goal of resolving the
 intertribal or international dispute.... This concept is not as
 foreign as it might seem; after all, the Irish Republican Army
 agreed to halt its military struggle to free Northern Ireland from
 British rule without recognizing British sovereignty. Irish
 Republicans continue to aspire to a united Ireland, free of British
 rule, but rely upon peaceful methods. Had the IRA been forced to
 renounce its vision of reuniting Ireland before negotiations could
 occur, peace would never have prevailed. Why should more be
 demanded of the Palestinians?

This is one example of some very conciliatory and, I think, far-reaching ideas put forward by Hamas leaders. Is it possible to find contradictory statements that appear more militant and more hard-line? Yes, absolutely. This is why engagement has to be reciprocal and gradual, recognizing that every political movement can only move as far as its constituency and its internal consensus will allow it. The British and U.S. governments recognized that when it came to the IRA; and recent revelations by Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's foreign-policy chief in the 1990s, have shown the extent to which the British government was prepared to negotiate with the IRA, even when there were no ceasefires. It seems to me real folly to turn down these kinds of overtures when Hamas is putting them forward.

In terms of a solution, as Dr. Zuhur pointed out, there is a lively internal debate within Hamas on a two-state solution, on a one-state solution, on other kinds of solutions. The door is open if we collectively in the United States are prepared to go through it.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think your ending remark is absolutely crucial. We live in a moment of great irony in which, for the first time, governments generally are committed to a two-state solution, while the sense in the region is that a two-state solution is becoming impossible to imagine. How can there be two states, when one of them is limited to less than 11 percent of the original territory of the Palestine mandate? How can there be two states, when one state has the sovereignty that we accord to Indian tribes, rather than the sort of sovereignty that is generally recognized internationally as pertinent to a state? In a sense, the offer to negotiate that comes from some important voices within Hamas is not necessarily an offer that will stay on the table forever.

HAIM MALKA: deputy director and fellow, Middle East Program, CSIS

For the past 15 years of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, we've been asking the wrong question. We've been asking how to get a final-status agreement as quickly as possible, when we should be asking what kind of Israeli-Palestinian agreement we can realistically achieve, given the difficult conditions on the ground and the numerous constraints.

There is a way forward, but we have to be realistic and practical about what can be achieved. Rather than push the sides to focus on a final-status agreement that is out of reach at this juncture, Israelis and Palestinians should instead pursue a long-term ceasefire or truce that includes Hamas. Strategically, we're still trying to get the parties to the same place, a final-status agreement, which will lead to a two-state solution. But the constraints to reaching that kind of agreement at the moment are too great.

Most important, perhaps, has been the rise of Hamas and its ability to thwart the negotiations through numerous rocket attacks and violence. Those attacks can be treated by Israeli military incursions and military operations, but they cannot be eliminated using military means alone. The reality is that no viable Israeli-Palestinian political agreement can be reached without the cooperation of Hamas. Continuing to marginalize and boycott Hamas will only lead to more violence and stalemate.

But, at the same time, there is no guarantee that bringing Hamas into a political framework will actually solve the difficult issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians and end the cycle of violence. Hamas is not about to renounce violence or recognize Israel, and its inclusion in the political process will likely make a final agreement even more difficult to reach. Both Palestinians and Israelis are skeptical that the current formula of negotiations will actually lead to a comprehensive agreement that has a chance of implementation.

A truce has a much better chance of stabilizing the crisis by decreasing the ongoing violence. Over time, it could strengthen the development of Palestinian institutions, including a non-politicized security force, and could normalize Palestinian-Israeli interactions. It could even lead to Israeli military withdrawals to the pre-October 2006 lines and beyond. The goal would be to create an interim accommodation and environment where serious negotiations could proceed without daily violence. It allows progress without forcing the two sides to compromise on existential and final-status issues that they're incapable of compromising on. This is admittedly a difficult approach, and it's fraught with danger, but, given the many constraints that I've outlined, it's probably the best option for moving forward.

What are the basic terms of this truce? They've been debated in the press quite a bit over the last few months. The ingredients of a truce should include a cease-fire, meaning a halt to all Palestinian rocket and other military attacks against Israel; a halt to all Israeli military incursions in the Palestinian territories; a prisoner exchange; and lifting the siege of Gaza. It also requires a minimum of Palestinian unity. Without an internal Palestinian accommodation between Hamas and Fatah, there can be no viable Israeli-Palestinian agreement of any kind.

What does a truce not include? A truce does not require any direct U.S. or Israeli engagement or negotiation with Hamas at this time. It certainly does not preclude direct contacts, but what is more important at this stage is a credible mediator or intermediary to work out the terms. It also does not mean abandoning President Abbas and the so-called moderates. President Abbas should remain the key Palestinian interlocutor, but he should not be prevented from working with Hamas and other factions to reach consensus on the many issues dividing Palestinians today. Most important, Washington should not block the resumption of a Palestinian unity government if that is what Palestinians conclude is in their national interest.

Ironically, a resumption of a Palestinian unity government or some kind of internal Palestinian accommodation will likely terminate the negotiation process underway between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert. That's not necessarily a negative development, and it may be better to have no negotiations than a negotiation process that only leads to more frustration, anger and violence.

Obviously, this is precisely the opposite of the current U.S. strategy launched at Annapolis. That strategy is based on further dividing Palestinians and has elevated the negotiations to sacred status, with the aim of reaching a framework agreement by the end of 2008. Such an agreement, if signed by President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, will be so watered down that it will be virtually devoid of any meaning. The United States has failed to recognize that what Israelis and Palestinians need most today is not a "framework" agreement, but an end to daily violence and terror. That can only be achieved through a broader political strategy that addresses Hamas's control of Gaza and its permanent role within Palestinian politics and society.

While the debate over Hamas is heating up here in Washington, it's been ongoing and intense in Israel for some time. What is interesting is that a gap has emerged between Israeli public opinion, which is starting to accept the idea of including Hamas in a political framework, and the position of the government and the military, which remain staunchly opposed. A poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that 64 percent of Israelis supported negotiations with Hamas over a cease-fire and a prisoner exchange. When it was broken down, over 50 percent of Likud voters also supported such negotiations with Hamas, which is a staggering number. Even cabinet ministers on the right, such as Shas party leader Eli Yishai, recently made a statement to the press calling for the government to engage in direct negotiations with Hamas over the release of Gilad Shalit. That's a significant shift for someone like Yishai, and he is not alone.

Israelis clearly want an interlocutor who can deliver, and they don't believe that President Abbas is that interlocutor, or that he has the ability to implement any agreement. This also demonstrates the Israeli public's willingness to deal with Hamas on some level and recognition that without Hamas's participation, very little progress can be made.

The government and military are more skeptical. They see the conflict with Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups as an ongoing war, and they do not want to lose operational freedom against Palestinian militants. They also fear that a cease-fire will allow Hamas and other militants to retrain and rearm, only to be stronger once hostilities resume. The see the hand of Iran behind militant groups and fear Iran's growing influence in Palestinian territories.

Despite the periodic, short lulls in the rocket fire that have been brokered over the last several years, the military is convinced that a renewed round of intense escalation is only a matter of time. They look at the example of Hezbollah, which stockpiled weapons and built up its infrastructure after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and its performance in the 2006 war. They see this as a very troubling precedent.

On the political level, the prime minister is wary of legitimizing Hamas and weakening President Abbas. The political echelon interprets any cease-fire arrangement as throwing a lifeline to Hamas at a time when it is seen as struggling in Gaza.

These are all valid concerns that must be addressed. Just because we think Hamas should be included in the political framework doesn't mean that that framework will necessarily succeed. It's been nearly two years since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas and other Palestinian factions, and all efforts to broker a prisoner exchange have failed. Even the periodic lulls in rocket attacks have broken down prematurely and have had limited success.

At the same time, the hardliners in Hamas, especially the military commanders in Gaza, are growing stronger and may oppose a truce. The political leadership, including the exiles in Damascus, will have a difficult time trying to sell the concept of a truce to the military leaders in Gaza.

So when we examine Hamas's role, we should have very modest objectives and be realistic about the challenges of including Hamas in a political framework. Rather than waste our efforts on a comprehensive agreement that is beyond reach at the moment, we should promote a long-term truce which includes Hamas and which could eventually set the stage for a more meaningful final-status agreement in the future.

The challenges to reaching a cease-fire are significant, and the window of opportunity is closing. While there is no guarantee this approach will succeed, any policy without a clear strategy to deal with Hamas will undoubtedly fail. Though it may be difficult for U.S. policy makers to fathom a role for Hamas in the political process, it may be the key to ending the ongoing cycle of violence.

AMB. FREEMAN: There seems to be a sense that we need to find a new framework for dealing with this issue. I gather that everyone who spoke believes that Hamas is, so far, a missing ingredient, but is unsure whether it's a villain or a victim and believes we won't find out until we give it a try. It's striking that the United States, in many respects, appears as a spoiler that is against the majority opinion on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side. The effort to destroy the Mecca initiative of Saudi Arabia to bring about a unified government in Palestine was quite intensive on our part. There's a question I think Haim raised, which is whether we wouldn't be better off stepping back and not interfering quite so much in the region. The Saudi initiative in Mecca, of course, had multiple motivations. One was to avoid leaving the field to Iran and to give Palestinians an alternative to Iran that they don't currently have.

The second, to be candid, was the desire to infect the rather politically appealing clean-government image of Hamas by associating it with the rather dirty image of Fatah, the hope being that, if you get a healthy movement in bed with an unhealthy one, then the disease will prove catching, and the healthy movement will be weakened. In any event, I would come at last to the question of whether, as you put it, Haim, no negotiations in some circumstances might be better than negotiations that do damage

SHILBEY TELHAMI: Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace And Development, University of Maryland, and non-resident fellow, Brookings Institution's Saban Center

Thanks very much, Chas. And thanks also to Anne Joyce--who helped organize this and has been a really remarkable editor of Middle East Policy over the years. She deserves a lot of credit. I am also proud to be speaking in this building, where I once had an office in the golden era of this establishment, when Lee Hamilton was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East and there were a lot of informational hearings. This kind of hearing could have been held by a congressional subcommittee. At that time, there were hearings on issues like the water problem in the Middle East and economic challenges in the region and all sorts of other issues that I also helped organize.

One does not have to glamorize or defend Hamas to note that the U.S. approach to Hamas has failed. And one shouldn't glamorize Hamas. Hamas does target civilians, and that is morally unacceptable under any circumstances. And a secularist is inevitably uneasy about an Islamist or any religious party because one does not know whether, in the end, they would abide by democratic rules or impose religious law, which makes most people uncomfortable, even most Palestinians, who don't want religious government. Those are legitimate concerns to debate and think and talk about. But facts are facts. If you look at where we are, it's a policy failure, no doubt.

Let's begin with Annapolis. When the meeting in Annapolis was held last November, the theory behind it was that, after the Hamas takeover of Gaza, this would be a way to bolster the moderates in the Middle East, to show that moderation and peace pay, and that militancy does not. The aim was in part to make it more difficult for Hamas and to reward the moderates who would be negotiating to open up a new peace process with the government of President Mahmoud Abbas, to show that moderation works.

Well, we know the results: there has been no significant progress and not much improvement on the ground in the West Bank, even as Gaza suffered more. But we can look at the public-opinion polls over the past year and a half, not just in the Palestinian territories but also across the Arab world. In my 2008 public-opinion poll conducted (with Zogby International) in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the results are telling. This is a very significant poll of 4,046 people conducted in April 2008 on a number of issues, including not only the Arab-Israeli conflict but also Iraq and Iran, attitudes toward the United States, global and regional issues.

Even from last year's poll, which I conducted in November and December of 2006 and released in February 2007, when you asked people to take a position on the Palestinian issue, what you had in the Arab world outside of the Palestinian areas is a majority of people saying they support a national-unity government above all. But of those who didn't support a national-unity government--who took sides with Hamas and Fatah--by a wide margin, they supported Hamas over Fatah at that time.

In the 2008 poll, you see similar trends not only in relation to Hamas and Fatah but also in relation to Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, where U.S. foreign policy has also been trying to "weaken the militants and empower the moderates." In the conflict between Hamas and Fatah, only 8 percent sympathize with Fatah most, while 18 percent sympathize with Hamas, and 38 percent sympathize with both to some extent. In so far as they see Palestinians as somewhat responsible for the state of affairs in Gaza, 15 percent blame Hamas's government most, 23 percent blame the government appointed by President Mahmoud Abbas, and 39 percent blame both equally.

In the Lebanese crisis, only 9 percent sympathize with the majority government coalition in the current internal crisis in Lebanon, while 30 percent sympathize with the opposition led by Hezbollah, 24 percent sympathize with neither side, and 19 percent sympthasize with both to some extent.

This is confirmed by my two recent trips to the Middle East, including just a couple of weeks ago in Saudi Arabia. Governments obviously have taken different positions; we're talking here about public opinion.

Governments, particularly those that are friendly with the United States, certainly don't want to see Hamas win. Some of them feel threatened by it. They want to deal with it because of reality, but they don't want to see it have an advantage. But if the hope is to weaken Hamas in public opinion to show that moderation pays, that's certainly not the outcome in public opinion across the Arab world, at least in the six countries that I have surveyed.

Why, you might ask? Let me give you several reasons, which provide context for Arab public opinion. The first is not so much about I-lamas and Fatah. If you recall, the 2006 Palestinian elections were held in the context of the American advocacy of democracy; this was the stated issue for American policy in the Middle East. One American justification for the Iraq War was to spread democracy in the Middle East. Clearly, it was very high on the agenda of American foreign policy.

By the way, according to every poll that I've conducted since 2003, the Arab public never believed that democracy was a real objective of American foreign policy. But the justification for holding elections, including the Palestinian elections, was the spread of democracy. There were people in the discourse here and abroad who said, we've heard it before, particularly in the late '80s with Bush I. But then, when Islamists started doing well, we backed off.

In response, President Bush said that the United States will not back off this time, even if Islamist parties won. American foreign policy will let democracy play itself out. Of course, Hamas got elected, and we know what the result was in terms of immediate confrontation, without even giving them a chance to be tested. So there's a broad sense in the Arab world that we're not allowing democracy to stand. There is even more frustration because, when you state an objective, they don't believe you to begin with, you say they should give you a chance, then you have another result that reconfirms their views; the intensity of their views grows even higher.

In Arab public opinion, by the way, based on both last year's and this year's polls, a majority of Arabs are prepared for a two-state solution based on the 1967 border. But when you ask them whether they believe it's going to happen, a large majority don't believe it's going to happen at all. They want it, but they don't believe it's realistic. This is very similar to the Palestinian-Israeli attitudes, where you have a majority of people who want a two-state solution, but they don't think it's going to happen, largely because they have little confidence in the other side.

Which explains the second reason for policy failure: one can be pro-peace and support militancy. That's the instrument by which you believe you're going to make the other do what they don't want to do, because you don't believe they're going to do it peacefully. When people have little hope for peaceful progress, it is much harder to dissuade them from supporting militancy.

Third, there is no confidence in American foreign policy. When you look at public opinion, 70 percent say they have absolutely no confidence in the United States of America. So if you ask them to have faith in the peace process, they obviously don't have faith in agreements because of previous results. They don't have confidence in American policy or American diplomacy.

Even worse than that, when you ask them to name the two biggest threats to them personally, the vast majority name Israel and the United States. Iran does not get that big a share. It gets only 7 percent in the 2008 poll. But the United States is named by over 80 percent of people as one of the two biggest threats to them. It's very hard to see how one can have confidence in foreign policy when one sees the United States as a threat. For all of these reasons, clearly U.S. policy toward Hamas is not working.

What is on the table now? First, I think the choice is not between talking to Hamas and not talking to Hamas. That is a procedural issue. The problem isn't whether you talk to someone or not; you can have somebody else talk to someone. It is whether you find an accommodation for them in your paradigm, whether you can see a place for them down the road, whether you set up to test them in a way that makes them party to a policy package. The problem in American foreign policy has been that there is no such place for Hamas and no serious mechanism for testing whether or not their stated agenda can change.

In essence, policy since the election of Hamas has been to bring them down. That is the problem. It hasn't worked, and right now the choice is to find a way to at least have them engage in a process or to accept the notion that they could be accommodated in the process. That might entail encouraging something that we have discouraged, which is having somebody like the Saudis or the Egyptians renegotiate a deal between Hamas and Fatah to construct a peace process based on the notion that Hamas simply cannot be defeated even if it is defeated militarily, since there is widespread grass-roots support for it. It is very hard to envision, in this environment, any peace deal that could hold while Hamas or its supporters can be spoilers.

AMB. FREEMAN: I want to pick up on something Shibley pointed to, which I heartily agree with: the important role that informational hearings in this chamber can have. I think about a time of trouble like the 1960s, and the important role that Senator Fulbright played in educating the American public to external realities that we had systematically not understood. I hope that, in the new Congress that will be coming into office next year, we will see a return to the practice of attempts at education of the public by nonpartisan, systematic exploration of issues, including this one, which is very crucial. I would like to commend all the panelists for getting us off to a good start.

Q&A

Q: I would take exception to Chas.'s comment towards the beginning that the Israelis made a mistake by their initial sponsorship of llamas in the form of licensing various charitable organizations. The more time that passes, the further we get away from any kind of feasible two-state solution, with the continuing expansion of the Israeli occupation and buildup of more and more parts of the West Bank, paralleling the process that has occurred on the Golan Heights.

The idea of focusing on achievable goals--a hudna, things like that--perpetuates an Israeli policy of buying time to absolutely nullify any prospect of a legitimate two-state solution, whether by deepening economic infrastructure and taking more of the territory, or politically targeted assassinations--first of Fatah and now of Hamas leaders--to ensure that, at every step along the way, the moderates are eliminated and the more radical elements gain the upper hand in reaction. Add to this the elimination of many of the most competent leaders. Aren't we really talking about continuation of an Israeli strategy that assures no possibility of peace?

MR. MALKA: In essence, I think the majority of Israelis and the Israeli political and military establishment, understand and recognize that they need to withdraw from a majority of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon recognized that; the Kadima platform recognized that. It is something that the Israeli majority has come to accept. How you get to that point is a question that is continuously debated. My point is that the current formula for negotiations--trying to get to an agreement where Israelis and Palestinians are forced to compromise on the final-status issues--is perpetuating the current situation as well. So it's a question of which perpetuates it more. What is more achievable? Should we be trying to focus on the final-status agreement, or should we try to get some sort of interim phase, where Israelis and Palestinians can start working out some of their issues? I think the formula for final-status negotiations that has been pursued for decades perpetuates the status quo.

DR. ZUHUR: I just wanted to go back to that original point. It's a little more complicated than saying that the Israelis facilitated the growth of Hamas. The simple answer is that they were very concerned with the PLO at the time and identified them as the terrorists. But the al-Mujamaa al-Islami was licensed, and the license was taken away. Then, through particular contacts, Yassin was able to restore it. But Israel has never had a unified policy, either on Islam, Muslims or Palestinians. Different groups from within the Ministries of Minority (and later Arab)Affairs, and Religious Affairs, and various Israeli entities have disagreed about the proper policies towards Palestinians and Muslims. The irony is, even within Israel, there is a strong Islamist movement. It was able to come in contact with Hamas only after 1967. And it came about because of the complete suppression of Islamic education and religious institutions.

In the West Bank and Gaza, after '67, the authorities who were there at the time--like the Ministry of Minority Affairs within Israel--said, no, no, we need to have civil-society groups growing. That's the area in which you could say there was some facilitation.

DR. TELHAMI: Certainly, the Israelis are capable of thinking strategically in the long term, and they have, at various stages. But Israelis are also capable of shooting themselves in the foot. I think this is one of those cases. I don't think it's by design. Israel has never had a single party with a majority in the Knesset since it was established 60 years ago. It's always a coalition government. Israelis don't have a solution other than a two-state solution for the long haul. And not only does the public understand, political elites actually understand it. I think the Israeli prime minister actually understands it. But they're incapable of making the seemingly smallest decisions (on ending the conflict), like removing roadblocks and freezing settlement construction, even in the middle of a peace process. This shows a profoundly complicating problem in their politics.

I wonder whether the limitations of Israeli politics will ever produce the kind of transformative leaders that would make decisions on the question of state identity and ultimate borders. I don't believe it'll happen from the region without mediation from the outside.

MR. ABUNIMAH: I think the danger that the questioner points out is real. We've seen Israel use the excuse of a so-called peace process to further entrench colonization and apartheid, and to complete the goal that was set out from the beginning of the Zionist movement of transforming a majority-non-Jewish country into a majority-Jewish country. That work is proceeding apace. We've seen this since Annapolis. So a hudna or a long-term cease-fire--by itself--is not enough, although I agree that that has to be a first step.

I think the challenge for all of us is to broaden the horizons of our discussion. So much of the policy discussion is framed in the context of looking only at the occupied territories and whether there will be a Palestinian state there or not. That's a mistake. The existential crisis that Israel faces, and has faced from the beginning, is how to impose a Jewish state on the reality of a country where the majority population is not Jewish and does not want to live in such a state.

That question was deferred for several decades because of the large-scale, forced exodus of Palestinians. It's now back on the agenda. Through the passage of time, Palestinians are once again on the cusp of being a majority between the river and the sea, which is why we have to be much more broad-minded. If Israel withdraws tomorrow from the West Bank and Gaza Strip--not very likely, I'll admit--this doesn't solve the conflict. As has been pointed out, there is an Islamist movement in Israel. There are more than a million Palestinians in Israel who are challenging the nature of the Israeli state as one that excludes them by law from all the privileges and rights of citizenship.

In sum, when you look at what they did in Northern Ireland, it was to come up with a framework that dealt with the issue of fundamental rights and equality. But that existed within the fundamentally opposing world views of Irish nationalism and the desire for Irish unity, on the one hand, and fierce loyalty to the British state and to the partition of Ireland, on the other. They did something pretty remarkable, which is to come up with a workable government that gives equal rights to every citizen, but has deferred those fundamental existential questions to some future time and to a democratic decision. These are the terms we have to be thinking in.

Q: I wanted to get clarification of a comment by Mr. Abunimah. I think he said that Hamas is portrayed as irrationalist and jihadist. The reason for that might be that in the Hamas Charter, the Lions Club and the Rotary Club are said to be agents of Zionist world takeover. A number of members of Congress are probably members of the Lions Club or the Rotary Club, and that's probably part of the irrationalism. The jihadist part appears to be correct, too. How can the members of Congress, for example, expect to deal with people who claim they're part of an international Jewish conspiracy?

MR. ABUNIMAH: I am very happy to correct you. The refrain that we hear constantly is the "Hamas Charter." At such a hearing 20 years ago, we would have heard the same refrain about the PLO Charter. If I wanted to dredge up a lot of, not just ancient, but current documents from Israeli leaders, from Israeli coalition partners--recent coalition partners like Moledet, or Yisrael Beitenu or some of the other parties like the National Union--they call for the expulsion of all Palestinians; they claim that all the land between the river and the sea was, amazingly, given to Israelis by God, and not to all the human beings who live there, a very strange and exclusivist viewpoint. There's no shortage of such things.

The point I would make is that social movements change. If the British government had looked only at the statements made by IRA leaders in the late 1960s or early 1970s, there would have been no peace process; there would not be a celebration next month, presided over by George Mitchell, of 10 years of the Belfast Agreement and a successful peace process.

What was understood in that case, and what was understood in South Africa, are two things: Peace is made with your enemies, not with your friends; and you have to look for where the change is. If you want to look only at the Hamas Charter, which was written by one person in 1988--under Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip during the middle of the intifada--and ignore the vast body of internal debate and development and thought that have happened in the subsequent 20 years, then I guarantee that you will get nowhere and will never find an opening.

I'm not that enamored of the Israeli government, but I don't presume that Palestinians have a right to choose the representatives of the Israeli people. You have to work with what's there. If you are determined to move forward, you have to look for where the openings are and talk about them.

DR. ZUHUR: There is a problem with discussions of jihadist groups in this post-9/11 environment. Hamas leaders and those I've interviewed have an element of defensiveness about this issue. They feel that they have to respond to these comments about the Charter and to comments that portray them as a movement like al-Qaeda. The Charter, as was pointed out, is the work of one individual. Hamas does not use it and its pronouncements today. There are many other more important documents. The best review of what has changed is by Azzam Tamimi in his book on Hamas. There is also a very good book by Khalid Hroub, who discusses how these standpoints have changed.

In the words of certain Hamas leaders, their point to me was that, "yes, we are an Islamist movement, yes, we are a child of the Ikhwan. But we are a political movement. Our goals are political--human rights, freedom of movement, rights to our own political representation and so on."

These issues are strangely absent from the discussion in the American media, where we read about a jihadist movement and whether people are going to give up jihad, forgetting the long dispute about how jihad must be implemented and what it really means to Muslims as they struggle to practice their faith. How do you practice your faith if you don't have personal freedom or any political rights?

DR. TELHAMI: Sometimes we get a little confused in this debate because it becomes so emotional. The question is not whether the United States should embrace Hamas or think Hamas is a good movement, or whether Hamas should be a friend of the United States. The issue is whether you deal with them. Dealing with someone is not about embracing them or accepting them or liking their agenda. We've dealt with Stalinist Russia and Maoist China; we've had dialogues and conversations. It's not about embracing someone when you talk to your enemy--just as Obama's suggesting talking to Iran. If Israel were to negotiate with Hamas tomorrow, the United States would likely support it. That should tell us something about this concern that was just raised. I don't think it's a real concern.

I think Israel is never going to make a full peace deal with Hamas unless Hamas changes its position on accepting Israel. And no one would expect them to. You're not going to sign a peace deal with a party that's going to reject your existence. Israel is justified in not signing a deal with Hamas, but the question is about talking, not about signing a full deal. It is about testing if Hamas can change to accommodate a deal. We forget that, in the end.

Finally, when Israelis take a position that says we'll never talk to Hamas unless they do X, Y, Z--they are a negotiating party taking negotiating positions. They should. Sometimes they're tough. They change their minds sometimes and compromise in making a deal. It's not always a principled position. But the American role is very different from the Israelis' role. We're a mediator and a facilitator, and we're looking after our own interests. Equating our position on this one with the Israeli position has to be thought out. We have a different role to play than the Israelis have.

Q: Coming back to the question of jihad, it is only in this room, and among pro-Israelis and some American groups, where jihad is thought to be an illegitimate instrument. Historically, jihad has been a very legitimate instrument of social and political struggle and change in the Muslim world. It is the Americans who magnified jihadis in Afghanistan, calling them mujahedeen. Jihad is not terrorism; it is a freedom struggle.

The question about whether to include Hamas in a dialogue is important, but I have doubts as to whether it will lead anywhere unless the realities on the ground change. Without the violence of jihad, why should Israel talk to Hamas? Even now, the support in Israel for talking with Hamas is due to the rocket attacks. Historically, from the American revolution until today, including the Indian independence movement, no colonial power ever left without the violence of jihad or a freedom struggle.

It is said that 39 percent of the population of old Palestine is now Palestinian, and that within 11 years a majority of the population will be Palestinians in old Palestine. Why should Hamas or any Palestinian or Arab opinion accept a two-state solution and 11 percent? Where do you see it is possible in this generation to reach a settlement? Or do we have to wait for the next generation, when the demography changes?

AMB. FREEMAN: I think it's fair to say that no one ever negotiates unless they believe that they must do so to gain something. Or that, if they don't negotiate, they will lose something. This is why armed struggle occurs in the context of negotiations, and why--illegitimate as it may seem at the time--it is usually, ex post facto, legitimized if it succeeds in producing a negotiation.

MR. ABUNIMAH: Currently, the Palestinian population in historic Palestine is 50 percent. That includes Israel and the occupied territories; it doesn't include the refugees and the diaspora. If you include them, then the Palestinian population is two-thirds, and the Israeli population is one-third, just about what it was in 1948. That balance has remained constant.

All negotiations depend on both sides having some bargaining strength. The Palestinians have some bargaining strength. Certainly the demographic shift back in their favor is part of it. And the Israelis recognize this, which is why they're eager to legitimize the status quo. But there are other kinds of power, as Ambassador Freeman mentioned, armed struggle being one of them. Historically, we have seen that liberation movements, however you view them, are always defined by the colonial power or the occupying power as terrorists, and by themselves as liberation movements. And almost always we see the transition from terrorist to statesman occurring. The first modern example of that in the Middle East was when Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir--who carried out assassinations, murders and bombings against civilians and British officers in Mandate Palestine--became the internationally respected leaders of Israel, prime ministers.

We saw that again when Nelson Mandela--who was called a "terrorist" by Dick Cheney; the ANC was also called a terrorist organization--has become the most beloved figure in the world. We saw the same with Yasser Arafat. Every Israeli school child was practically taught that he was a devil, yet he was embraced by Israeli leaders, perhaps even before he was embraced by many Palestinians. We saw that in December when Martin McGuinness, the former second-in-command of the Provisional IRA, was received at the White House as the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.

There is a pattern here. But the change in perception doesn't begin to happen until there is a stalemate, until both sides recognize that there's no such thing as victory, and that both sides have more to lose from refusing to make a deal that serves the interests of both peoples, than continuing to fight. I think the potential for that shift is there in Palestine, and that's why we're here having this discussion today.

MR. MALKA: It's in the interests of both sides to negotiate. We also forget that, should the negotiations falter--should a negotiation or an agreement get to the point where it becomes obvious that there is no agreement--the Israelis still have other options. They don't talk about these options very often. But there is still the option of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank. That is a card that the Israelis continue to hold, despite the negative developments that have come out of the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza. The concept has been discredited within Israel, but people are starting to talk about it again. Should the negotiations get to a dead end, Israel still could decide to withdraw to the line of the wall or the fence. That may be an option for the future.

DR. TELHAMI: There is no real Israeli unilateral option. People may talk about it, may think about it. I don't think anybody really believes this could work, not simply because they don't see the Gaza and Hezbollah examples working, but also because if you pull out without a peace agreement, then you're still in a state of war. And if you're in a state of war, in the anarchic environment that you leave behind, inevitably those who are going to come after you are going to get stronger over time because you can't stop it. So, you either are going to have to go back in--as the Israelis are now talking about doing in Gaza, which doesn't solve the problem, it complicates it even more--or you have a problem like the one you have now.

I don't think it's a credible threat. In this generation, there's only one possible solution that elites have accommodated themselves to. You can talk about it as being fair or unfair, just or unjust, but there's only one possible solution for now: a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, side by side with Israel. That's still the only viable option. Yes, people are losing faith in it. That's part of the problem, not just that it's becoming less possible because of changes on the ground. I think the public still wants this as an option, but a large number of people are thinking that it's no longer viable. More important, many of the elites who have embraced this option are now bailing out on it.

That's when it starts to be troubling, because then you start detaching yourself from it and linking yourself to some other option. And there aren't many for the Palestinians other than a one-state solution. That is not something the Israelis or Zionism broadly could possibly accept. So what you end up having is a situation of continued violence.

It's always hard, without immediate urgency, for people to make concessions on the basis of future pain. That is part of the problem for every negotiation, because every concession is costly. Is a leader going to make a concession on the basis of future pain that they see as almost inevitable? That has been the problem. That is why I do not believe that the dynamics of conflict, in and of themselves, are going to lead to an automatic solution.

We've done this scientifically. I've studied this with a group of scholars (Joshua Goldstein, Jon Pevehouse, and Deborah Gerner) over a period of 20 years from 1979 to 1998. We've studied nearly 20 years of "action and reaction" to daily behavior in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What we found is that, despite asymmetries of power, each side responds, in kind, to the other. Tit-for-tat becomes the norm over time, and despite the fact that all parties are worse off the morning after, they don't necessarily learn to cooperate. With or without conflict, you can escalate violence, but the Israelis may not learn from this that they should make a deal. They may learn that they should do something else. We've seen this in the past. That is why I don't think the solution is built into this conflict. It has to be exogenous; it has to come from other factors. That's why I think American mediation is indispensable. There's nothing in the dynamic of this conflict, including violence, that is going to lead to an automatic solution that says, let's cooperate because we're both worse off than we were the day before.

DR. ZUHUR: I agree with Shibley that a solution will require strong involvement from the international community and also the Arab states. You're trying to shift two different types of strategic thinking. Israel claims that it has changed its strategic thinking, and that's why it proposed a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza without speaking to the other side. And it began to pursue some other things--a perimeter wall. Perimeter defense is not an effective defense of a population. It does not involve a political solution. Indeed, the population centers in Israel were vulnerable to mortar attacks and suicide attacks.

On the Hamas side, they saw that the only time there were any Israeli concessions--any movement towards negotiation--it was as a result of the first intifada, and these attacks in the second intifada. One of the leaders I had spoken to, Nasir al-Din Shaer, said, "So which language should Hamas use, the language of negotiation or the language of jihad? I'm trying to speak the language of negotiation, but what am I gaining?"

AMB. FREEMAN: We have to remind ourselves that there is a broader context. There are 300 million Arabs. And Israel needs to find acceptance in the Middle East from its neighbors, and from Arabs and Muslims in particular, or it can never be secure. You cannot live in a house in a neighborhood with your gun drawn 24 hours a day and hope to survive forever. I think the issue, therefore, is that it is not responsible for the United States, as a friend of Israel, to encourage the Israelis in the notion that military security equals security. There will be no peace. There will be no acceptance of Israel, by the Arabs or by the Muslims, including the Iranians and the Indonesians and others, if Israel does not find a way of coexisting peacefully with the other inhabitants of the land in which it has established itself. That is a fact. This context, more than anything, ought to drive American consideration of the need for mediation.

Q: What is the role of the Arab states in helping to bring Hamas into the mainstream, and even bring them into negotiations?

AMB. FREEMAN: It's a very good question. As I said at the outset, most Arab states and their leaders are very skeptical or even antagonistic to Hamas. So this illustrates the point that was made earlier by Shibley and Ali, that you don't have to like someone to recognize the need to factor them into the equation.

DR. TELHAMI: Since Hamas got elected in January 2006, there have been different approaches. Even when Hamas won and people were surprised, an envoy who went to see the president--an American envoy--said that the president's first reaction was; maybe it's all for the better, maybe we'll see if they can now perform. They now have to govern. That attitude was reflected in the immediate reaction of many Arab elites: maybe it's a good thing, they thought. Let's see if they can govern. Let's test them. I attended a regional conference in Doha, Qatar, just a couple of weeks after the election, with people from all over the region. And there was tremendous optimism this was going to happen, even among secularist Arab intellectuals.

The Egyptian and Jordanian governments were even prepared to mediate, if reluctantly. There was a sense that that might happen. But the Bush administration decided that this was not going to work. Remember, there was a Hamas government; President Abbas, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority accepted the elections. There was a Hamas government, with Mahmoud Abbas as president, and Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister. The initial inclination of President Abbas was, let's see what happens. First of all, they will be tested, and they will find out how difficult it is to govern. But maybe I'll do the negotiations--they won't have to do the acceptance of Israel, but I'll do the negotiations. Then they'll be able to say yes or no.

The Bush administration went against that approach. And when things heated up, the Saudis took an initiative to bring Hamas and Fatah together. They were worried that Hamas was going to fall into the lap of Iran. They didn't think it was a natural alliance, but they thought that if they were isolated, then they would create that link with Iran. The Saudis were already taking a very tough position against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and they did not want to create the kind of alliance that ultimately emerged. And they succeeded in mediating a Palestinian unity government. But the Bush administration did not accept that. It didn't believe that this was something we could deal with.

So the problem isn't just Arab governments. It is reasonable to argue that they haven't done enough on the Arab-Israeli issue. Sometimes they try, and then they don't maintain the campaign. But we haven't facilitated that. And most of them are tied to us and to our policy because the Israelis ultimately are the ones who are going to decide whether there are going to be sanctions against Gaza or not, whether there are going to be sanctions against Hamas or not. It's very hard for Arabs to succeed in a strategy of mediation between Hamas and Fatah, or even directly with Hamas, without cooperation from us.

I was told that, when President Bush went to the Middle East on his last trip and met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, he asked him not to try again to mediate between Hamas and Fatah. So, clearly, we're taking an active role, not just a passive one, in making sure that Arab mediation is not an option that's on the table.

AMB. FREEMAN: In all fairness to the Saudi mediation at Mecca, I think the principal motive was twofold: to end the fighting among Palestinians, which was a nauseating spectacle; and to help produce a viable negotiating partner for a peace process, which at the time did not exist. But it had additional motives, as I suggested. And Shibley is right, we acted to frustrate it. In this context, it's also noteworthy that the ultimate answer to your question is implicit in the Beirut Declaration or the so-called Arab peace plan, which is not really a plan but an incentive for Israelis and Palestinians to reach agreement, which would then trigger normalization by the entire Arab world with Israel. That proposal is now in some difficulty, as frustrations mount. It would be a shame if that offer of acceptance to Israel by the region were to be taken off the table. That is a distinct possibility as time passes.

MR. ABUNIMAH: I think the Saudi role in negotiating the Mecca agreement, which ended the fighting and brought in the national-unity government in February 2007, was a very positive thing. It was largely supported by Palestinians, and it was a very rare act of independence by an Arab state. That points out the broader context. It infuriated the United States and Condoleezza Rice and inspired her to accelerate her plan to support the militias to overthrow Hamas. But the overall Arab context is very depressing otherwise. You have a slow-rolling collapse of the Arab regimes' legitimacy. They have failed to govern--we talk about Hamas being tested by governance--while Arab governments have failed by so many measures to fulfill the promise that they set out for their people in the post-colonial period. And now we're seeing a slow-rolling succession crisis, in which so many of the republics are becoming, effectively, monarchies. We see it happening in Libya and Egypt; we see an attempt to make it happen in Lebanon.

Superimposed on that you have what the United States is doing, on a local scale, in Palestine and Lebanon, of picking winners--picking one side and declaring the other side to be the enemy. And this is not just among groups, but with reference to half the population of those countries. We see the United States attempting to impose on a regional level the use of counterproductive sectarian discourse to divide Arab states into so-called "moderate Sunni states," and "extremist Shia" states or entities. We saw a part of the result of that in the last Arab summit in Damascus, where half of the leaders didn't show up. I'm not sure if Dr. Telhami's polls will confirm this, but probably the vast majority of Arab public opinion doesn't think it would have made a difference if they had shown up.

MR. MALKA: A strong Arab role is key to bridging some of the gaps between Hamas and Fatah. There are obviously very deep divisions between them, and it's unlikely that all of their issues will be resolved. The Mecca agreement was probably the best development that had come along over the last few years. Unfortunately that was undermined.

One thing that would strengthen Arab mediation is coordination. That was one of the problems of Mecca--there was very little coordination between the Saudis and the United States, and even Israel. Reaching out more to Israel, by the Arab states, on this issue would also help. But it's also important to recognize that Mecca didn't come out of a vacuum. It built on the Prisoners Document that was negotiated by Hamas and Fatah and other Palestinian factions within Israeli prisons. Palestinians themselves have been working on these issues and trying to resolve the deep divisions. That's important, and the Arab states need to strengthen that effort.

Q: I am one who sees Hamas as an opportunity and not an opponent, and one who believes what Martin Buber, the father of the philosophy of dialogue, said: reconciliation breeds reconciliation. I'm looking forward to when we reconvene this same group after the election, where America once again is a partner. Talk can actually have an effect.

It appears to me Gaza is approaching a Darfur-esque situation. One thing we haven't mentioned is economic assistance, a donor's conference for Gaza. People have to realize that we're not going to get anywhere until we get the Arabs, Saudis, Americans, even Israelis to say, let's have a donor conference in a peace framework and then we can go from there and negotiate a two-state solution or whatever it's going to be. But I haven't heard anybody mention the economic rehabilitation of Gaza. I'm wondering what you think of the possibility of that, even though maybe not until after the election.

DR. TELHAMI: One of the tragedies of the discourse about Hamas is that it has hidden what should be an obvious humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And not just in Gaza, in the West Bank as well, although Gaza obviously is much, much worse. We also forget the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, who are in an increasingly difficult environment. A true humanitarian crisis is being covered up by the debate about Hamas, and it's really unfortunate. Regardless of politics, we have a real tragedy on our hands, and it can get worse. We need to deal with it.

There is a problem with separating economics from politics. Gaza is not a state. Gaza is still under Israeli sovereign control, still occupied territory. Israel has pulled out, but Gaza doesn't have access to the outside world without the approval of not only the Israelis, but also the Egyptians. Egyptians are obligated not to allow Gazans to go through without coordination with Israel.

So in the end it's really about the Israelis. If they are going to impose a fuel blockade, as they have done, or any other kind of economic blockade, no matter what aid you're going to send to Gaza, it can't get through. Then there's the implementation problem the humanitarian organizations face. Who's going to do it? How do you do it without rewarding Hamas? Part of it is a built-in contradiction: if the policy is to show that Hamas is failing, part of the failure is the misery. So if you improve the economic conditions in Gaza, aren't you showing that Hamas is succeeding? That's where it's very hard to separate policy from the economic issue. There's a built-in contradiction, and in the end, politics trumps in this particular case.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'm struck by your comparison with Darfur, and I feel obliged to note the key distinction. The United States may be guilty in the case of Darfur of failing to take action, but in the case of Gaza we are directly supporting the siege with an ally, and we are directly involved and therefore accountable for what is happening there. That is, to me, the crucial distinction that ought to weigh heavily on our conscience.

MR. ABUNIMAH: I also appreciate the comparison to Darfur, a case where a civilian population is terrorized in a systematic way by an unaccountable government. The Save Darfur movement has demonstrated the legitimacy of divestment and sanctions on college campuses across this country. It has been supported by many people here on Capitol Hill and is a good model that many activists for Palestinian human rights and peace between Israelis and Palestinians are trying to follow. The Save Darfur movement has blazed that trail by establishing the legitimacy of boycott, divestment and sanctions in such cases.

Regarding economic and humanitarian aid, many Palestinians--and there's some research evidence that shows it's a majority of them at this point--have come to believe that the role the international community has played these 15-odd years since the peace process started is to subsidize Israeli occupation. "Humanitarian" is a lovely word, and we all feel good about it, but these are not humanitarian crises. The Palestinians are not victims of an earthquake or a tsunami or global warming. The starvation, the hunger, the suffering are a result of policy choices made in the defense ministry in Tel Aviv and the cabinet room in Jerusalem. There is one government in the country that decides whether people in Gaza eat or not, whether factories get raw materials or not, whether there's fuel or electricity.

Allowing that to go on and simply trying to throw in some aid as a palliative will simply get them off the hook. We have to understand the political and deliberately inflicted nature of the so-called humanitarian crisis and address that, and we need to end the subsidy of Israeli occupation. Israel cannot continue to occupy and colonize and destroy while the European Union and other countries come in and pick up the mess. These things have to be tied together. We cannot keep funding Israeli occupation.

MR. MALKA: Obviously, economic rehabilitation is a serious component of any kind of development. But to place the blame for the siege of Gaza on one party is only part of the picture. As Ambassador Freeman said, U.S. policy is also supporting the siege. The international community, the European Union is supporting the siege as well. The reality is that every party to this conflict is manipulating the humanitarian crisis and the siege for its own purposes. Israel certainly, and the Egyptians as well. Hamas is limiting the flow of goods and fuel into Gaza. President Abbas and the PA government in Ramallah have been accused--and there is evidence of this--of withholding medicine and food shipments and putting pressure on the Israelis as well to limit the flow of goods into Gaza. So I think it's important to recognize that every single party involved is manipulating this crisis.

AMB. FREEMAN: Which is pretty sickening.

DR. ZUHUR: An economic solution will ultimately have to be part of the political solution. Before the withdrawal from Gaza, I went there and was interviewing the Mawasi. They're a Bedouin group in the middle of the Gaza strip. They've been trapped there for decades, not able to go to their homes in Khan Younis. They're not allowed to go there. They're stuck within this little strip of land. Their income used to be from sandy agriculture, which was taken over by settlements, and fishing and boating. They thought when they heard about the Gaza withdrawal that they'd be able to begin fishing again. We have this vision of Gaza as maybe an Arab tourist site. None of that happened. Instead, the situation has worsened.

The whole idea of Palestinian economic dependency on Israel is very important. Workers are not going to be able to go into Israel. A decision has been made in the Knesset that, instead, other forms of labor, whether Asian or Ukrainian or whatever, is going to substitute for Palestinian day laborers. So this is something that has to be part of the overall picture.

The last serious discussions were in the Oslo period. RAND did a very important study looking just at the West Bank and its developmental needs. Because of the Star Points Plan (intended by then-Minister of Housing Ariel Sharon to erase the Green Line between Qalqilya and other West Bank towns and villages and nearby Palestinian towns in the Triangle region) and all the settlements and so on, you have dislocation of one area from another. So you can't really function as an economy until you look at all these things, even without the current crisis. And in the current crisis you have Hamas's various charities completely shut down. It affects not only this situation. Look at the Muslim charities in the United States as a result of accusations of their being arms of Hamas. If you want to donate to any group, you have to be very, very careful or you're going to be charged with giving material aid to terrorism.

Q: When I interviewed Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar two years ago in some depth in Gaza, he said, "Right on this spot, my son was killed by an American missile fired from an American plane, piloted by an Israeli pilot." When you have leadership of this kind, which has the experience of dealing with the United States, you wonder if we can ever have a positive influence on what's happening, or just delay, delay, delay.

I'd like to ask a question about coalition. We've talked about the Mecca agreement. Last week, Ms. Rice was in Jerusalem and was asked if there could be a cease-fire, which might lead to a coalition. She said just one word--no--in a very decisive way. Could a coalition be put together, and would that be a step towards a negotiator on the Palestinian side who would perhaps be able to come to agreement on two states, or one state with two states in it? Shimon Peres said back in '93, eventually it will come down to the Jewish colonists--he didn't call them that--on the West Bank voting for two members of parliament, one in the Knesset and one in the Palestinian parliament. There would be two parliaments. And the Palestinians in the West Bank would vote for two members, one in Jordan and one in the Palestinian parliament.

MR. MALKA: A Palestinian unity government is a requirement for any effort to get to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, whatever that agreement might be, whether it's a final-status agreement or an interim agreement, truce or hudna. Whether that can happen is debatable. There's a debate going on right now on whether Palestinians themselves can bridge some of these deep problems that are separating them, that are not just about the elections in 2006 but go back over a decade, if not more. Hamas very much sees itself as the alternative to the secular nationalist agenda of the PLO, and Fatah doesn't want to recognize that it has lost its monopoly over the Palestinian Authority, the governing institutions, the security forces.

Whether those gaps can be bridged is a major question mark. If they can't, I don't think we're going to get even a long-term cease-fire, or hudna. But it's clear that that has to happen so Palestinians themselves can determine their own red lines for negotiations. I don't believe that a one-state option is really a solution to anything. I don't see it within the realm of the possible because, as Shibley noted earlier, the Israelis will not accept that and will do anything it takes to prevent it.

The wall or the fence is in part a way to demarcate a future border. Whether agreed upon or not, it will essentially be a de facto border from the position of the Israelis, and that will prevent the creation of a one-state solution.

DR. TELHAMI: I want to say something more about the introductory remark about administration policy, particularly in the last year. I have been critical of administration policy throughout; obviously I still am. But I'm always struck when there's an apparent effort to give negotiations a chance, particularly when we all call for the administration to try. If you ask me as a political scientist, what's the prospect that a major peace deal is going to happen this year, I would say it's not very high. But I wouldn't say it's zero, and that poses a dilemma. In fact, I'm actually a bit concerned about what might happen. We might fall into the trap of saying there's nothing at all that can be done. With all the limitations, one cannot be a determinist or else diplomacy can never succeed and real change in history can never happen.

Let me tell you how I see this, particularly for the next administration. The first fight is always for the priorities of the president. What are the top priorities for the United States of America? If a president doesn't think Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a priority for America, diplomacy is not going to work. It doesn't matter what the president does, whether there is a special envoy or not. In order to succeed, you need the weight of the presidency; you have to decide it's a priority. No matter what we do, we're going to have two immediate priorities after the elections, Iraq and the economy. It doesn't matter what we do in Iraq; even if we disengage, it's going to be a priority for several years. And the economy is in trouble. So there will be a fight for the other priorities.

How this administration finishes on this issue matters a lot for the decisions of the next president, and whether this issue should be a priority or not. When Clinton left office and was seen to have been a failure at Camp David, and the intifada started and the confrontation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bush came in and said, Clinton tried hard and failed, I'm not going to touch it. If we have another president who looks like he tried hard and failed, the next one, whether it's Obama or Clinton or McCain, is going to hesitate. So it's actually very important how this administration finishes on this issue. Even if you don't call it a success, you don't want to have a total disaster on your hands. If you do, you're going to have an immediate disinclination by the next president to deal with it.

Therefore, if you still believe that the two-state solution remains viable, you have to be pragmatic about what can be achieved so that there will be continuity into the next administration, so there is something on the table to work with that can put this on the president's agenda. There are possibilities. It isn't going to be something like a peace treaty that's immediately implementable, but it is possible to envision that you can at least get the Israeli prime minister and President Mahmoud Abbas, to agree to some very important parameters of final status and, more important, to have the president of the United States commit to very clear principles on borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

Even though we've been critical of policy, if the United States is seen to have put a lot of energy into negotiations and failed, the cost is way too high for everybody who really wants to see peace. The president has repeatedly said he intends to do something before he leaves. I don't think it's just talk. I think he might believe it, though he may not fully understand what it entails. He is intending to go to the region in May, and I suspect that he's going to do a bit more in the coming months. So I think that we should not look at this entirely through a cynical lens--though I repeat that, as an analyst, I believe that the prospects of even partial success remain small. Here, I can see how someone who has already given up completely on the two-state solution would not want to see themselves as postponing the obvious in giving diplomacy any credibility.

MR. MALKA: I want to pick up on Shibley's point, which I agree with. It's not only the U.S. president who wants a success here. It's the Israeli prime minister and President Abbas. They have both tied their political fates to the success of these negotiations. They do not have a whole lot else to show for themselves, either economically or socially or politically. Therefore, they are very much in favor of trying to reach some sort of agreement. But again, the agreement that they will actually reach will probably be so watered down that it will have very little meaning. We have to question the utility or the benefit of that kind of agreement, which many people will be very skeptical of.

AMB. FREEMAN: This raises the point that a two-state solution that is not acceptable to the majority of the people on both sides would be worse than no agreement at all.

MR. ABUNIMAH: I think it's a mistake, historically and morally, to condition what we think is possible on what we think the strong will accept. If we did that, there would still be slavery in the United States. There would still be Jim Crow, where segregation was called a way of life and something that mayors and senators and presidential candidates and members of Congress strongly endorsed and supported. The Ku Klux Klan, which once had 5 million members, making it the largest political organization in the history of the United States, would still have its influence. Women would not vote. There would have been no end to apartheid in South Africa. There would have been no end to Unionist dominance in Northern Ireland. The list can go on and on. Of course, Israelis would not accept a one-state solution today. Israelis do not accept a two-state solution today. What the majority think is a two-state solution is just apartheid packaged as a two-state solution. And many Israelis aren't prepared to be even that generous with the Palestinians.

So a real peace agreement will depend on a shift in the balance of power until Israelis understand that they have more to lose from maintaining the status quo than changing it. That's what happened in apartheid South Africa. One year, whites voted 70 percent for the national party, the party of apartheid. A year later, 70 percent voted in a whites-only referendum to end apartheid, when they understood they had more to lose from hanging on than from embracing change with all its risks.

A point that Dr. Telhami made--and I agree with him completely--is that the elites have persuaded themselves that a two-state solution is the only possible outcome. Everywhere else this debate is lively, demanding debate and change and new thinking. I travel to college campuses all over the country. Students are debating a one-state solution, a two-state solution and alternatives to it. In the Gaza Strip, there is a group organized for a single democratic secular state along the lines of post-apartheid South Africa. Within Hamas, there is a discussion about models for multi-ethnic democracy and how Islamist ideology can be adapted to that. Among Palestinians in the West Bank, it's also happening. A few months ago, I participated in an ongoing dialogue with Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals, activists and others, and we came up with something called the one-state declaration, which begins to lay out principles for an alternative. This debate is happening everywhere. Dismissing it is not going to work.

I suspect that the last place the debate will happen is here in Washington. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue it in the rest of the country and the world, and open our imaginations to alternatives that give Israelis and Palestinians what they both fundamentally need: equal rights, security, autonomy in terms of their language, their culture, education. The form of how that can be arranged is limitless. We will not get there unless we engage in the discussion.

DR. TELHAMI: You're absolutely right about elites, but it's also about public opinion. If you look at Khalil Shikaki's polls among Palestinians, there's still a robust majority supporting two states. There is an increasing number who think it's not going to happen, but there's still a majority. In Arab public opinion, a majority still support two states. Actually, there was an increase in the number of Arabs who in principle support a two-state solution from 2006-2008--just as there was an increase in the degree of expressed pessimism about its prospects. But I want to tell you something about what people think if the two-state solution collapses. Would there be a one-state solution? Would the Palestinians simply give up? Or would the conflict be protracted for many years to come? Or would the status quo continue? Very few people, about 7 percent, believe the Palestinians would ever give up,. But only about 10 percent believe there will be a one-state solution. Fifty percent believe there will be a protracted, bloody conflict for many years to come.

That's the way the public sees it. Among Palestinian elites and even some Israeli elites and some others, as you start believing that a two-state solution is not going to happen, where are you going to take refuge? I think the only intellectual position for the Palestinians and many people who support them is going to be one state. The question is whether that's going to happen in Israel in the short term. Anybody who thinks it's going to happen doesn't understand the strength of the Zionist movement for much of the twentieth century. Is it going to happen without a big fight, if it's going to happen at all? Those kinds of fights, historically--while sometimes we have been surprised, as we were with South Africa--don't always end nicely. Anybody who thinks that one can know where it's going to end up has not studied history very well and is being selective. We don't know.

But at a minimum, in the foreseeable future, there would be protracted conflict. If the two-state solution collapses, psychologically and practically, that's what we're going to face, whether we want it or not. If you are someone who wants to see an end to this conflict in this generation and you want it as fair as possible and in the short term, there's only one address for you: the two-state solution. Until you completely give up on it. Until you say it's not going to happen, and therefore I'm going to change. This may take place in the coming months, as trends of public and elite pessimism indicate.

MR. ABUNIMAH: I do look at Dr. Shikaki's polls and all the other polls regularly, and in the last poll of Dr. Shikaki, support for a two-state solution in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip was 50 percent. This is a remarkably low number, given the billions of dollars invested by a very large peace-process industry, telling us that this is the only possible solution. In 10 years of Dr. Shikaki's polling, even with all the questions about methodology, support for a two-state solution in the occupied territories has rarely exceeded the low 60s. Meanwhile, support for a single democratic state--there's not been much polling that gets into the details of what that would look like, but we're clear that it's a state for both peoples--hovers between 25 and 35 percent, a remarkably high figure, given the fact that there isn't a single political movement in the mainstream advocating it.

Among Palestinian citizens of Israel, there is overwhelming support for the principle of a state of all its citizens with equal rights. The discussion is now moving toward a single state in historic Palestine. You have seen the documents that have surfaced in the past year. Nobody ever polls Palestinians in the diaspora; we like to pretend they don't exist because they're such an inconvenience to the two-state solution. There we know the fundamental issue is the fight of return, which is incompatible with a two-state solution. We also know that there is an increasing debate in the diaspora for a one-state solution. Shibley is absolutely right; we don't know what the outcome will be when the two-state solution collapses. It's already collapsing. The hegemony of this idea is under threat. It's time to recognize that and to begin to embrace alternatives.

I keep coming back to South Africa or Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, people used to say there was no possible solution. Now we have the equivalent of a Likud-Hamas coalition in Belfast. In South Africa, people used to say there would never be a transition to democracy; as soon as blacks got power, they would take their revenge on whites and throw them into the sea. The end of the story has not been written, either in Northern Ireland or in South Africa. But these are two examples that did defy the worst predictions.

I think the worst thing we can do at this moment, when the hegemonic idea is collapsing before our very eyes, is to close our minds to alternatives and to discussion of what Israelis need to have a safe, secure and happy life and what Palestinians need to have. Are there alternatives to the one that has failed for 70 years, since the first partition proposals were put on the table in 1937? This peace process offered us a Palestinian state in 1999, and then in May 2002, and then by the end of 2005, and then by the end of 2008. And now we're told that we might have an outline agreement in 2009. Another administration will come along for eight years, and in the last three months we'll be told not to disturb anything so that the administration that takes office in 2016 can have a clear shot at the two-state solution. Let us have a real debate about this. There is no other issue--not Social Security, not health care, not any other foreign-policy issue--where we decide there is only one possible solution and close our minds to all the alternatives.

DR. ZUHUR: I admire your passion for the possibility of the one-state solution, but I would like to see people focus on our subject today, which is bringing in all Palestinians to whatever solution or whatever discussion it's going to be. I think there is a real danger in this administration's approach to the region. This issue has disappeared from much of the United States. People are talking about Tibet, and Palestine is almost forgotten. I'm not sure whether Haim's idea that simply moving along with the hudna is the right idea, but I do think that predicting on the basis of what a president can do, and what's the least possible we can get, is wrong at this moment. We saw Tony Blair go to the Middle East as a special emissary and say proudly that he wasn't going to speak to Hamas. Where does that get us? Maybe there do need to be outside actors. Everyone does need to open their imaginations, but I think something needs to move very soon.

Q: Dr. Telhami, you said in your opening statement that one of the main things that you know from your public-opinion poll is that the Arab world does not believe that the United States is out to bring democracy. What in your opinion has been our biggest failure in giving that message to the Arab world, and how can we do that better?

DR. TELHAMI: It really hasn't been our priority; they're right. We say that, but it really hasn't. When you ask them, what do you think the top priorities are, they say controlling oil, helping Israel and dominating the region. But let me tell you why they don't believe us: Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Those are the three big elections that we celebrated as indications of post-Iraq-War changes. From the Arab point of view, Iraq is a total humanitarian disaster. Eighty percent of the Arab public thinks that Iraqis are worse off than they were before the war. If you are the president of Syria asking your public, do you want Damascus or do you want Baghdad, they'll take Damascus over Baghdad any day of the week. So, clearly, our models have not been good.

Second, I think we have not been fully honest with ourselves. The vast majority of the public in the region opposed the Iraq War. The vast majority of the public opposed our policy on the Arab-Israeli issue. The vast majority of the public saw our war on terrorism as a war on Islam, the way we defined it initially. The governments themselves didn't think the Iraq War was a good idea and told us so. But we said, we are going to do it anyway and we need your support. These strategic allies went along with it because they have no strategic choice. They said, we're nervous about it; you're going against public opinion. Second, even as they hold elections, superficial elections in some cases, they're increasingly nervous and unleash the security services and pre-empt opposition, arrest people to make sure that there is no revolt against them.

So when people see what we do, our strategic objectives trump our democracy policy, particularly when we're at war. The priority for the United States now is not democracy. It's the Iraq War and it's the war on terrorism. So our relationship with Egypt and Jordan is first and foremost not through the economic aid that we give for democracy NGOs. It is through military-to-military relations and the cooperative relationship for the passage of U.S. ships through the Suez Canal. And intelligence, which is extraordinarily important.

So in essence we are supporting and strengthening the very institutions that we're trying to weaken through democracy: the state institutions that seem to be the institutions of repression. You inevitably strengthen them by virtue of your military and strategic priorities. Whether or not we believed it, many in the Arab world, even governments, didn't believe that we were promoting democracy as a matter of strategic policy. Arab governments believe this was used as an instrument to make them cooperate strategically, to show that we're prepared to undermine them unless they cooperate. They use Libya as an example, where there's no real change in the Libyan domestic power structure that we can call "democracy," but there was a change of policy based on their strategic cooperation.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think the panelists have made a case that the next president is going to have to deal with this issue. It is not an automatic priority for the next administration, as has been said. The next president will confront recession, inflation, budget, trade problems, balance-of-payments deficits, a collapsing dollar, pension systems that are in a state of grave jeopardy and many collapsing, a healthcare and insurance system that is escalating costs without escalating care delivery, collapsing infrastructure, a process of de-industrialization that is deeply disturbing to our workforce, and the constant threat of retaliatory attack by those we offend abroad in the form of terrorism; the issue of Iraq; the war in Afghanistan, which is not going anywhere terribly attractive at the moment; the question of Iran; the transatlantic relationship, which is in a state of decay; the re-emergence of a quasi-czarist Russia; difficulties in our relations with Latin America; uncertainties in our relations with China, particularly after the Olympics and all the shenanigans around them; a strategically perplexed Japan; and an international monetary-reserve system that no longer functions.

I think the case has been made, however, that the Arab-Israeli issue deserves a high place, even in that formidable list. And I wish whoever is president well.