A reader writes, ?After having read your recent FP article, I am left rather perplexed for two reasons,? essentially about the authority of President Obama in the US government, and the authority of Hamas among Palestinians. Thanks for these two questions. Let?s take them one by one, shall we?

Question one:
?First off, you seem to put a great deal of hope upon President Obama’s shoulders. This is problematic as it presupposes the President’s individual agency to bring about a settlement to a 61 year old conflict as well as completely shift decades old American policy. This perspective also completely overlooks the role of entire apparatus which has created and maintained the decades-old policy. Jimmy Carter, the only American president to have done some positive for the conflict and the only who has even attempted the effort, has repeatedly and openly attested to the limitations to which he found himself bound during his years in the White House.?

I think this is pretty straightforward, and is based on a misunderstanding about my perception of what is driving US policy in the right direction. There is no question that President Obama is firmly in the driver?s seat, directing policy according to his own judgments. However, and this seems to be what the reader is suggesting, Obama is not operating off on his own tangent or in a vacuum of support. In fact, Obama?s policy transformation of US policy on the occupation and the settlements, and the centrality to American interests of creating a Palestinian state, reflects a broad consensus that has been developing over the past two years in the American foreign policy establishment generally. As I touched on yesterday, this includes many Jewish-American members of Congress and other influential figures who are traditionally staunch supporters of Israel. I completely disagree with the reader?s implication that President Obama is following his own personal judgments and will therefore meet with insurmountable resistance from bureaucrats and other Washington power centers that will thwart his innovations. I think in fact his correctives have been widely welcomed throughout not only the government, but the foreign policy establishment as a whole, I think he is acting with the full support of not only his administration, but a majority in Congress and a majority in the foreign policy community more broadly. It is the resistance to Obama’s policies that is isolated thus far, and while I recognize that Prime Minister Netanyahu was trying to mobilize more support among Jewish Americans to resist the President’s leadership, I do not think he is going to succeed in getting the administration to drop their insistence on an effective settlement freeze.

Question two:
?Secondly, you mention that Obama is going to need help shifting Israel from its current political stance – considering how the current leadership has taken the already-bludgeoned peace process to a further halt, do you really think any shift within its policy will suffice for grounds for talks to begin? And what of the elected representatives of the Palestinians – Hamas? By completely ignoring the role of the elected representatives of Palestinians, we are simply subjecting the Palestinians to what has helped exacerbate this conflict: non-representative (also external) Arab parties dictating the Palestinian’s future without taking into consideration their interests. Israel must freeze its settlements and tear down the wall, Hamas must be involved in the peace talks, Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination if it requires that Hamas recognizes it, and the blockade of Gaza must end. Then we start talking about reliable partners for peace.?

This is somewhat more complicated. I certainly do think that if Israel were to agree to an effective settlement freeze and the Palestinians continue to do what they should on security, permanent status negotiations become the very real possibility, especially under enthusiastic and engaged American leadership. I don’t agree that there is any real possibility of non-representative or external parties dictating Palestine’s future (unless it might be Iran through Hamas, which is a whole other story). There is no question, although many people seem to be somewhat confused on the issue, about what entity is authorized to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian people with Israel: the PLO. This is not debatable as a legal or political matter, and there is no Palestinian, Arab or international document whatsoever that does not recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and no document that recognizes any other entity in that role. Even Hamas has never claimed such a thing, although they do call for an alternative and restructured PLO. So, there is no confusion about this, although supporters of the Israeli far-right and supporters of the Palestinian ultra-right like to pretend that there is.

There is, therefore, no legal or political basis or need for Hamas to be involved in permanent status or other national level negotiations with Israel, although there is always a usefulness in parties talking to each other, as they do. Additionally, there is the question of whether Hamas would even want to be involved in permanent status peace negotiations with Israel since they do not recognize Israel, do not accept the goal of a two-state solution, speak only in terms of a 10-50 year “hudna” (or truce) with Israel that is of no interest to any other party, especially the Israelis, and do not recognize any of the agreements or understandings that form the basis for these negotiations. If, in spite of taking all of these positions, Hamas would want to participate in major peace negotiations with Israel, the organization would be effectively schizophrenic, and its positions even more incoherent than we already have seen to date.

The conditions of the Quartet for Hamas to join negotiations and become a plausible interlocutor are also in the Palestinian national interest: that it must recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and disarm, and accept the legitimacy of existing Palestinian agreements. This last point is unshakable, while in effect Hamas could probably go far enough in meeting the first two requirements by irrevocably and clearly accepting the goal of a two state agreement with Israel and by renouncing terrorism, as the PLO did in the late 1980s. That it should take these steps is very much in the Palestinian national interest, since Palestinian national goals such as ending the occupation and achieving independence can only be secured through an agreement with Israel, and as long as Israel has plausible grounds for refusing to talk to a major Palestinian political party, it serves as a liability with regard to achieving independence and freedom.

Moreover, in all likelihood the Hamas leadership understands that an end to the occupation and independence is the most ambitious agenda that the Palestinian national movement can seriously pursue under the present circumstances. If they do understand this, then the only way in which their approach makes any sense whatsoever is that it is being primarily driven by the aim of replacing the PLO as the main Palestinian national political entity. To do so, Hamas must continue to outbid the PLO at all levels of Palestinian nationalism, since it cannot achieve domestic political primacy based on religious fanaticism alone (which is not a path to power among the Palestinian majority). It must yoke its ultraconservative agenda with a nationalist agenda in order to move beyond its rather limited base of core support among the Palestinian religious-right. In my view, everything that the organization has done in recent years should be viewed through the lens of its ambition to marginalize and effectively eliminate the PLO, and establish itself as the “address” for Palestine regionally and internationally, since that?s the only way their behavior makes any sense at all. If it is ever able to succeed in doing this, it will probably mean the elimination of the Palestinian cause as a viable political project. If the Palestinian national movement becomes indistinguishable from a broader Islamist agenda, its potential to succeed in producing any useful or politically worthy results will be effectively foreclosed.

Finally, there is the question of the 2006 election. The reader refers to Hamas as “the elected representatives of the Palestinian people,” which is not entirely false, but also misleading in its formulation. First of all, as noted above, it is the PLO which is empowered to negotiate with Israel, and that authority is not derived from or subject to elections, although most people agree that any permanent status agreement should be the subject of a broad-based referendum among both Israelis and Palestinians. Therefore, winning a majority in the 2006 parliamentary election does nothing to affect who is authorized to negotiate for Palestinians with Israel. On the question of Palestinian government, there were, in fact, two recent elections, not one. In January 2005, following the death of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas was elected president (which gives him in fact authority over foreign policy) with 63% of the vote. One year later, in January 2006, Hamas-backed candidates won a parliamentary majority with 44% of the vote. That means that Palestinians elected one party to the presidency and another to the Parliament, producing a divided government. Therefore, to say simply that, “Hamas is the elected representative of the Palestinian people” is only half the story, at best.

By the way, Abbas? term expired in January of this year, but according to Palestinian law, the president remains in place until a new president is chosen through a new election, which has not yet happened. One of the only things that Fateh and Hamas negotiators were able to agree in their numerous negotiations in Cairo was that new presidential and parliamentary elections should be held in January, 2010. It’s obviously essential that this election go ahead under almost any circumstances, to clarify the will of the Palestinian people as to their elected government. However, to pick and choose which election one recognizes, who is legitimate or not legitimate based on which election result one likes, or anything similar isn’t particularly credible, and friends of Hamas are as guilty of this as Western governments have been. I have to say, I’m somewhat of a loss to understand the appeal that Hamas has for many people who ought to know better, and I have much more to say on this subject in the future.