White House: Direct talks are the best way to combat Hamas

Of the many questions hanging over the new direct talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday morning, one of the thorniest is what to do about the militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is not a party to the negotiations.

White House officials addressed that topic directly Friday afternoon on a private conference call with Jewish community groups, saying that the talks would build legitimacy for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in his struggle against Hamas and that a peace agreement would convince the Palestinian people to abandon Hamas and its violent methods.

"The ability of the forces of moderation and the forces of peace among Palestinians to prevail will be greatly enhanced once they’re able to point to an ongoing peace process and ultimately a peace treaty and I think the Palestinian people will see that for what it is," said David Hale, deputy special envoy for Middle East peace, according to a record of the call made available to The Cable.

"Abbas offers the Palestinian people the choice of negotiating your problems and challenges rather than trying to use violence or terrorism to try to achieve your goals," Hale said. "Abbas is strengthened in the eyes of the Palestinian people when he’s able to show his course of peace actually produces results. So we think that by entering into direct talks, it ought to be able to strengthen his position rather than the opposite."

Abbas has not yet actually accepted the invitation to join the talks, but he is in his final consultations and the White House expects to communicate his positive answer soon. Hamas, for its part, has already rejected the negotiations.

Earlier this week, Hamas Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the invitation, "would form a cover to Abbas and his Fatah party to go to the negotiations and would help them to escape from embarrassment before Arab and Islamic public opinion."

As for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has already accepted the invitation to have dinner with Abbas, President Obama, Quartet Representative Tony Blair, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Washington on Sept. 1 and then sit down with Abbas and Clinton Sept. 2 to begin the talks. Obama intends to hold bilateral meetings with all four leaders that day as well.

"Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomes the invitation of the United States to begin direct negotiations without preconditions," read a statement issued by his office Friday, referring his demand that no preconditions be attached to the discussions.

So far, Abbas has only said he welcomes an accompanying statement by the Quartet, a statement that reaffirms past Quartet statements that do have what some would call preconditions, such as a demand that Israel halt all settlement building, but doesn’t explicitly repeat them.

Nevertheless, "these are talks without preconditions," emphasized Dennis Ross, director for the central region on the National Security Council, on the call.

"Obviously they take place within a certain context," said Ross. "Clearly the challenge for us is to overcome gaps. The gaps are real; we shouldn’t have any illusions about the difficulties we are going to face. But you are never going to get anywhere if the parties can’t deal with each other directly."

The Obama dinner is not meant to be a photo op, but rather a chance to establish an atmosphere of trust, said Ross. "The significance of the dinner is somehow not to suggest we have some high-profile event, it’s a reminder that the aim of this process is to produce coexistence and reconciliation. There’s clearly a trust deficit that we’re going to have to find a way to overcome that."

There’s not much detail about what will happen after the Sept. 2 meeting because those specifics simply haven’t been worked out yet. It will be an intensive process once begun, without long gaps between meetings, said Hale. Some meetings will include the United States; others won’t. The one-year timeline Clinton announced is a serious goal, not a hard deadline.

"We will definitely want to make sure there’s a structure that allows us to have a full and careful review of all the issues but also allows us to move toward that objective," Hale said.

The aim of the call was to get community groups, especially Jewish community groups — some of whom have been critical of President Obama — behind the effort and to ask for their help.

"There are going to plenty of those who don’t want these negotiations to succeed. And one of our real challenges is to build some real momentum behind these negotiations and to build a kind of context in which they take place so they have the best chance to succeed," Ross said. "The degree to which we can generate a lot of public support for this effort is something that in the long run will contribute to its ultimate success."

Groups on the call included the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee, J Street, the law firm of Greenberg Traurig, the Orthodox Union, and the Boca Raton Synagogue.

(Corrected: Netanyahu’s title corrected to "prime minister.")