[Raj_Copi_Jin]

Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the now defunct Irish Republican Army (IRA,) says
…the international community has to recognise the democratic mandate of Hamas and open dialogue with them.
It’s a commonly held view and dialogue is such a lovely word. Why can’t we open dialogue with Hamas? After all, we were able to talk to the Provos and get things pretty much sorted out. Jaw jaw better than war war and all that, no?
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Gerry Adams own journey - from leader of an organization dedicated to ending British rule in Northern Ireland and forcing its Protestant population into a united Ireland against its will by the use of armed force freely seasoned with sectarian massacres to postmodern democratic politician - shows us why.
Up to the start of the 1980s, the British government and the Provisional IRA (popularly known as the Provos) had entered into negotiations, both in public and in private, on a number of occasions. The talks always foundered on the same point: the Provos were only interested in the British setting a date for withdrawal. In the absence of such a commitment, they were willing to abandon the negotiations, as they felt confident that, sooner or later, the British would crack under the pressure of sustaining the conflict.
The Provos combined this unyielding faith in armed struggle with a notable contempt for electoral politics, which they regarded as the domain of sell-outs. Why would they bother finding out the viewpoint of the ordinary people of Northern Ireland when all they had to do determine the territory’s true destiny was to look into their own hearts?
This started to change with the 1981 Hunger Strike. The election of the dying Bobby Sands to the UK House of Commons demonstrated to the Provo leadership that a lot of people would be willing to vote for Sinn Féin in the right circumstances. Though it would take years to come to fruition, a sea change got underway in the Provisional Republican movement which saw it gradually move away from the use of force - their capacity for which was being continually eroded by the British anway - and towards participation in more or less normal democratic politics. Along the way they abandoned their ambition to destroy the Northern Ireland state and settled instead for a guaranteed but limited role in governing it.
If there was the slightest sign that Hamas was on the point of undergoing such a transformation, then the case for entering into talks with it on issues of substance would be worth listening to. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to any evidence to suggest this. Far from opening the door to a move away from terrorism, its 2006 electoral victory seems to have confirmed its bellicosity and maximalist demands. Yes, I know, there has been talk of a long term truce with Israel, but there hasn’t been a hint of a basic willingness to accept the right to exist of the Jews’ state and I see no reason why the Israelis should accept their neighbor’s merely postponing, as opposed to abandoning, their ambition to destroy them.
I am not saying that Hamas would have to recognize Israel’s existence right from the start of negotiations, though negotiations that didn’t eventually produce such recognition would be pointless. What we could reasonably expect at the outset would be a change of tone in Hamas’s statements. While they could continue to justify the use of force, it wouldn’t be too difficult to detect a change pointing to war weariness and a willingness to cut a deal, if such a tone was present.
It took all of Adams immense cunning and capacity for telling his interlocutors what they want to hear to coax his Provo comrades away from the Armalite rifle and towards the ballot box as the exclusive legitimate field for political struggle. He was aided by the fact that Provo ideology - though betrayed a thousand times with the most appalling sectarian atrocities - had part of its roots in the Enlightenment and proclaimed the equality of all men, regardless of their religious or ethnic background. For reasons that readers of this blog won’t need reminding of, any future Adams figure in Hamas isn’t going to have such resources to draw on.


http://blog.z-word.com/2009/01/posit...amas/#more-870