There Is No Pleasing Some People

Heaven knows, I carry no candle for Hamas. The Levant remained a bulwark against Islamist expansionism while it remained a civilisation of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze, with Arabic as its lingua franca and with its de facto capital at Damascus. But a dreadful wound was inflicted on that in 1948, from which it has still begun to recover hardly, if at all. Not only the rise of Hamas, but the very existence of Hamas, makes that wound only too shockingly visible.

But if Hamas really can never come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel, simply as a fact of life, then with what does it imagine itself to have been negotiating, thereby scoring the significant public relations victory that is the release of hundreds of detainees? For that matter, if Israel can never deal with Hamas, that what has she been doing in this case, and would she rather that Gilad Shalit had been left to rot? Next, we shall be told that Israel can never accept a Palestinian State, raising the question of with what she imagines herself to be negotiating on a regular basis.