Former UK Ambassador at the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock has caused a stir with his various observations on the BBC about Hamas – summary here by Paul Waugh.

In the vast noise the Israel/Palestine/Gaza/Hamas generates it is next to impossible to keep any discussion coherent. See any Comments thread after any article anywhere on the matter.

One way of looking at the Greenstock line of argument is to try to break it down to some more manageable first principle issues of Diplomatic Technique:

  • are Hamas really as ghastly as they seem to be?
  • one way or the other, are they people to whom (for better or worse) we should all be talking? 
  • is Israel’s latest military action making a difficult situation far worse, including for itself?

Melanie Phillips swipes pretty convincingly at the argument that the Hamas charter is mainly ‘rhetorical’. Methinks FCO Arabists do no-one a favour (above all the Palestinians) by playing down the quasi-Nazi roots and language of these people.

As for talking to Hamas, odious or not, the trouble with not talking to powerful determined people is that you normally end up doing so, not necessarily strengthened by all the years of perching on a smug policy high horse which did not take you anywhere useful. See eg the EU now lamely opting for more ‘dialogue’ with Belarus, after years of getting nowhere through ‘isolating’ the Belarus regime.

And in any case it is wise policy to divide and rule, and to drive wedges – to aim to peel off the moderate extremists (such as they are) from the extreme extremists and total psychopaths. 

For the average extremist, life is simple. It often pays to create new levels of complexity for them – to give them new things to think about and more subtle choices to make. Engagement does that rather well, if done craftily. And saying so does not make you insane, or a tool of the extremists. 

But craftily means craftily. Giving a lead (or, worse, predominant) role to extremists totally demoralises moderates and encourages a ‘the worse we behave, the more we get’ tendency – exactly the wrong incentive structure. See eg the policy incoherence which characterised a lot of the Clinton/Holbrooke and wider Western method of dealing with devil-we-know Milosevic in the 1990s.

Is Israel making a bad situation worse?

That again depends where you start and what you want. This powerful piece by Daniel Finkelstein captures something important:

… the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren’t ancient history, and they aren’t fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren’t icons, or symbols of anything.

The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her.

The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews…  

That of course does not explain away all sorts of Israeli mistakes and misdeeds down the decades.

But a small country in which almost every person has had numerous relatives murdered in one or other genocide is going to have a different view of what makes sense ‘in the long run’ – especially when the strategic problems are increasingly unconventional. And agonisingly difficult.

The line quoted at the top of this Blog is lifted from a telegram I sent to the FCO in 2005 about the commemorations of the Liberation of Auschwitz.

It’s one thing to exclaim impatiently that the Jews should now ‘move on’ and get over it.

Another to stand in the camp for four hours in sub-zero temperatures to watch world leaders in turn pay homage to the remaining group of elderly Auschwitz survivors, wrapped in blankets which helped a bit with the snow but could not shield them from the frozen horror of their memories. And later, in 2006, to see a German Pope visit Auschwitz and try to find the right words of contrition, perhaps not quite successfully.

Impenetrable blackness indeed.