Britain’s lawmakers reiterated calls for their government to engage with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, warning that the Hamas isolation is part of Western policies which has failed to bring signs of success in achieving peace in the Middle East.
The government should urgently consider engaging with moderate elements within Hamas,” said. The House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee in its ‘Global security’ report issued. The Committee affirmed it stood by a recommendation it first made two years ago that London should engage with Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip.
Currently, Britain and other Western nations refuse to talk to Hamas until it accepts the conditions of the international Quartet – the United Nations, the US, the European Union and Russia – of recognizing Israel, accepting signed peace agreements and ending what they described as “violence” against Israel.
But the committee, made up of MPs from all the main political parties in Britain, concluded that Britain should talk to Hamas as a way of encouraging the group to meet the Quartet conditions.
Their report contrasted the government’s stance with its decision last March to open contacts with the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah.
“We further recommend that the government should set out the relevant differences between the cases of Hezbollah and Hamas that lead it to conclude that engagement with moderate elements within Hamas is not currently worth attempting.”
Led by the US, the West has rejected contacts with Hamas since the group swept Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and came to power.
But calls for dialogue with Hamas have intensified recently, especially after Israel’s three-week war which killed more than 1,350 people, mostly civilians.
Last March, a group of former international peace negotiators urged the West to re-think isolation Hamas, insisting the group must be engaged in the peace process.
Middle East Quartet envoy and former British premier Tony Blair has also called for Hamas inclusion in the peace process.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged the West to respect the democratic Palestinian elections that brought Hamas to power.
Ineffective
The report affirmed that the Quartet’s Hamas isolation policy was achieving very little.
We conclude that there continue to be few signs that the current policy of non-engagement is achieving the Quartet’s stated objectives,” the committee said.
“We further conclude that the credible peace process for which the Quartet hopes, as part of its strategy for undercutting Hamas, is likely to be difficult to achieve without greater co-operation from Hamas itself.”
The European Union, Palestinians biggest donors, also froze all financial aid to the Palestinian territories under the Hamas-led government.
Rather than shunning the group, the committee said, the Quartet should have provided Hamas with greater incentives to change its position on its demands.
Britain’s prominent lawmakers also criticized other policies of the Quartet for achieving little change to several issues that contributed to the Middle East conflict.
They lamented that while the Quartet and Western nations were bent on ostracizing Hamas, there was little pressure on exerted on the Israeli side to comply with peace demands.
We conclude that efforts at diplomatic persuasion have to date been ineffective in securing Israeli compliance with a number of Quartet demands, said the report.
The committee also condemned Israel’s continuing refusal to the international community’s calls to stop settlements expansion and allow unrestricted humanitarian relief to the besieged Gaza Strip.
The MPs believe the West should undertake new policies to pressure Israeli into accepting peace initiatives.
For example, they said, Europe’s relations with Israel should be bound to halting its practices against the Palestinians.
It is appropriate and potentially effective for the EU to make the planned “upgrade” of its relations with Israel conditional on Israel halting practices which are prejudicial to the achievement of a two-state solution.
-Agencies