Last week, senior Hamas and United States officials expressed to the media their mutual willingness to engage in “a dialogue”. The statements by senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk and US presidential Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff most likely meant to test the waters for future diplomatic moves, perhaps due to their shared recognition that Israel’s current war-making frenzy in the region, which could soon reach Iran, is bad news for all concerned.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly shown his intention to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, which detract from his bigger plans to reconfigure US global relations; and Hamas has taken an opportunity to demonstrate during the ceasefire that it is still in control of Gaza and remains an important political group among the Palestinians.
In this context, the sudden inclination by the US and Hamas towards “dialogue” should be taken seriously and explored carefully because it is possible and in the best interest of all concerned in the Middle East and beyond.
There is certainly a wide gulf between the two actors: Washington has been deeply complicit in Israel’s genocidal devastation in Gaza, while the Hamas resistance movement is widely seen as a terrorist organisation by much of the West. But this is precisely why they must meet, talk, and accurately identify each other’s positions and potential to shift from militarism to peacemaking. The ongoing ceasefire is an opportunity to launch this process, which is why completing its three phases should now be the top priority.
Effective Israeli propaganda has long demonised Hamas in the West as a reckless and vicious terror group that wants to destroy Israel. The reality, however, is that Hamas has been a successful Palestinian national political organisation because it has combined the three critical dynamics that most of the world’s 14 million Palestinians support: principled and sustained resistance against US-enabled Israeli colonisation and subjugation; political activism to forge a national political programme supported by all Palestinian factions; and pragmatism that constantly explores how to peacefully resolve the conflict with Zionism.
Understanding Hamas and its positions does not mean recognising it formally, adopting its views, or refraining from criticising its militancy, which usually reflects the global definition of permissible armed resistance to occupation, and occasionally fits the definition of terrorism against civilians.
Like most liberation movements, Hamas simultaneously practises militarism, resistance, terrorism and political pragmatism. Recognising and separating those strands is a key to engaging the movement on the path towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel – that is, if an Israeli government ever emerges that genuinely seeks a just permanent peace.
A US-Hamas dialogue now could clarify if both of them seek peace. My lifelong interactions with Palestinian leaders indicate that the most important but unappreciated attribute of Hamas and the entire Palestine Liberation Organization leadership has been their longstanding willingness to establish a Palestinian state that would coexist peacefully with Israel within its 1967 borders adjusted by mutual consent.
Hamas has officially, informally and repeatedly expressed this view, which has been unanimously formalised in pan-Arab peace offers to Israel since 2002. These positions were reaffirmed again last week in an interview by senior Hamas official Basem Naim.
A peaceful resolution has never happened mainly because hardline Israeli leaders have consistently ignored these offers by Hamas and all other Palestinian groups.
The Canadian scholar Colter Louwerse shows in his research how US-Israeli defiance has been the main obstacle since the 1970s to implementing the international law-based consensus for a two-state resolution of the conflict. As he wrote in 2023: “In January 1976, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) offered to negotiate the terms of this “two-state” consensus. With Washington’s support, Israel refused the good-faith Palestinian proposal […] Israeli-American bad-faith rejectionism is, in fact, the primary ‘obstacle to peace’.”
This rejectionism along, with relentless Israeli aggression, reflects the Zionist-Israeli aim since 1920 to evict as many Palestinians as possible from their ancestral lands and formalise exclusive Jewish sovereignty over all of historic Palestine.
As the conflict has worsened and expanded across the region, from the Arab side, the terms that Hamas accepted have remained on the table. They are tough, but realistic. They require Zionism to define its borders and end its colonial rampage in the region, and the Palestinians to formally accept statehood on just 22 percent of historic Palestine.
All agreements that drop war in favour of peace are tough and demand rigorous changes in policy on all sides. The end of the South African apartheid regime and the US wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan are a few examples of how tough compromises for peace can be – but also how vital they are.
If Witkoff and Abu Marzouk were speaking for their respective governments, as I suspect they were, this is the time to move ahead with a US-Hamas dialogue and ignore the howlers all around, especially in the US and Israel, who will try to stop this important step from happening.
Any dialogue must above all avoid the mistakes of the 1993 Oslo Process and other peacemaking attempts, which substituted endless talking sessions about concessions on both sides, while Israeli colonial expansions and annexations continued with explicit US support.
We must work overtime to take advantage of this opportunity, in the wake of expanding wars and much suffering, to shift the entire Middle East from its disastrous current path of militarism towards future coexistence among all states.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
