April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who helped broker peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, said that Israel's enemy Hamas may accept, under certain circumstances, the Jewish state's right to exist.

 

Hamas leaders told Carter that the group would accept a peace agreement negotiated by the leader of the rival Fatah group, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on condition that the agreement is submitted to the Palestinian people for approval, the former president said in a speech in Jerusalem.

 

``Hamas leaders said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 border and the right of Israel to live as a neighbor, provided the agreement was submitted to the Palestinian people for overall approval,'' Carter said.

 

Hamas later said it wouldn't necessarily accept the results of a peace referendum, the Associated Press reported, and Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal said from Damascus the group won't recognize Israel. Mashaal offered Israel a 10-year truce if it withdraws from lands seized in 1967, AP added.

 

The Islamic group which seized control of the Gaza Strip in June is sworn to Israel's destruction, and launches regular rocket attacks against Israeli towns, killing and maiming citizens. Israel has imposed a military and economic blockade on Gaza in a bid to stop the rockets and undermine Hamas rule, and has fired missiles into Gaza aimed at those launching rockets and at terrorist leaders, sometimes inadvertently killing or injuring citizens.

 

`Actions, Words'

 

The Bush administration said it didn't support Carter's meeting with a terrorist organization and was skeptical about what it accomplished. ``You have to look at public comments and actions. Actions speak louder than words,'' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with President George W. Bush today on Air Force One to New Orleans.

 

Abbas, who is in control of the West Bank, renewed negotiations with Israel in December about a framework peace agreement that Bush wants by the end of the year. The two Palestinian factions don't recognize each other's right to rule.

 

A cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas is imminent, Ahmed Yousef, a spokesman for the Islamic organization said today. Hamas sent its proposals to Israel and is now awaiting a response.

 

``We expect a real development in this regard in the coming few days,'' Yousef said. Carter said that Hamas had rejected his proposal for a 30-day unilateral cease-fire.

Syria's Role

 

Syria believes that nearly all its differences with Israel have been resolved and that talks ``just need to be reconvened,'' Carter said in Jerusalem after meeting with Syrian officials in Damascus. Syria is eager that the U.S. play a ``strong role'' in talks with Israel, while in the meantime, the U.S. is opposing talks, Carter said.

 

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad confirmed his country exchanged messages with Israel via third parties about the possibility of resuming peace talks, Syria's state-run SANA news service reported today. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the daily Yediot Ahronot last week that the two countries, which failed to sign a peace accord after the Six-Day war in 1967, clarified what they expect from a potential peace accord. Each side now understands what the other wants, Olmert said.

 

Carter said that, while he is glad that Bush is committed to reaching a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, there is a general feeling that no progress is being made of any significance in the talks.

 

`Just Isn't Working'

 

The Israeli-U.S. strategy of excluding Syria and Hamas from peace negotiations ``just isn't working,'' and they would have to be involved in order to make progress, Carter said.

 

Hamas leaders said that they are making progress in Egyptian-mediated talks about a prisoner exchange that would include Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Palestinian gunmen in June 2006. Hamas has agreed to allow Shalit to send a letter to his parents, Carter said.

 

Carter's speech came after meeting with exiled Hamas leader Mashaal in Damascus and other Hamas officials in Cairo over the past week.

 

By meeting with Hamas officials, Carter went against the policy of the Bush administration, which says Hamas must be sidelined until it recognizes Israel and ends violence, and ignored Israeli objections. The U.S. considers the group a terrorist organization.

 

Hamas won 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and ousted forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas from the Gaza Strip in June last year. Abbas heads the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and controls the West Bank.

 

`Obstacle to Peace'

 

During a visit to Israel on April 11, U.S. Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice told reporters that she found it ``hard to understand what is to be gained by having discussions with Hamas when Hamas is, in fact, an obstacle to peace.''

Fifty members of the U.S. Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, wrote an appeal to Carter on April 14 not to meet with Hamas.

 

In Carter's visit to Israel, President Shimon Peres told him it was a ``mistake'' to meet with Hamas. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declined to receive the former U.S. leader. Israel barred Carter from crossing into the Gaza Strip.

 

Since his 1977-1981 presidency, Carter has occasionally embarked on private diplomacy. In 1994, he visited Pyongyang and persuaded North Korea to freeze its nuclear program. The agreement collapsed when the CIA discovered, in 2002, that North Korea ran a covert uranium-enrichment program. Carter also visited U.S. adversaries Iraq, when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein, and Cuba.

 

Egypt navigates a delicate path with Hamas: it has called for Israel to lift a trade and travel blockade of the Gaza Strip, while declining to open its own border to Gazans, which has been forcibly breached in the past. Instead, Egypt has tried to mediate in the Abbas-Hamas dispute.

 

Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting peaceful solutions to conflicts and social and economic justice.

Carter Says Hamas and Syria Are Open to Peace

 

Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated Press

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke at the Israeli Council of Foreign Relations in Jerusalem on Monday.

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: April 22, 2008

JERUSALEM — Jimmy Carter, the former American president, said on Monday that he had obtained a significant concession from the Palestinian group Hamas regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace and also found the Syrian leadership eager for a full peace treaty with Israel.

 

Mr. Carter, who spoke in Jerusalem after several days of talks in the Syrian capital, Damascus, said he had extracted from Hamas a promise to respect the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if it were ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people.

 

He said further that Syria believed “about 85 percent” of the issues between it and Israel had been resolved in prior negotiations and it wanted a peace deal “as soon as possible.”

 

Given the general pessimism surrounding Israeli-Arab peace, Mr. Carter’s upbeat assessment had a contrarian quality to it, as did his decision to meet in Damascus with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the Hamas leadership, all of whom are shunned by the Bush administration which asked him not to hold the meetings.

 

Mr. Carter called the agreement on a Palestinian state, obtained from Hamas in writing, important because it meant that Hamas, a radical group excluded from the Palestinian Authority yet currently ruling in the Gaza Strip, would not disrupt the negotiations or implementation of any accord if the Palestinian people supported it in a free vote.

 

“If the agreement calls for a two-state solution and the recognition of Israel and Palestine, Hamas will, in effect, recognize Israel, if the people agree on the plan,” Mr. Carter told the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in a speech here.

 

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Carter struck a more cautious note, saying, “I’m not claiming it’s a breakthrough.” He added, “I don’t have any control over whether or not Hamas does what they tell me. I just know what they tell me.”

 

Israeli officials opposed Mr. Carter’s meetings with Hamas leaders, saying doing so legitimizes a group they consider to be a terrorist organization. But Mr. Carter said on Monday, “The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria. The problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet these people.”

 

How a referendum would work is not clear. Mr. Carter said in the interview that he understood that only those Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would participate and that the voting would be monitored by international observers, including observers from the Carter Center.

 

But Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader in Damascus with whom Mr. Carter had spoken, gave a televised news conference late Monday and said that Hamas wants all Palestinians, including those living abroad, to vote. Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would likely insist on a right of return to their original homes in what is today Israel, something Israel has said it could never accept.

 

Mr. Meshal also focused on the return of Palestinians to Israel and Hamas’s refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy when he said, "Hamas accepts the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and with full and real sovereignty and full application of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return but Hamas will not recognize the state of Israel."

 

In addition, Mr. Meshal emphasized something else — that no referendum could take place before Hamas and Fatah had reconciled their bitter dispute and the Palestine Liberation Organization, from which Hamas is excluded, was “reformed” to include it.

 

Such goals seem at the moment rather distant.

 

Mr. Carter had tried to get Hamas to agree to several other requests and all were turned down. Those included a prisoner exchange and declaring a 30-day unilateral cease-fire with Israel — Hamas fires rockets on Israeli towns and communities in an effort to hurt and kill civilians. On Monday a 4-year-old child was injured from shrapnel after a rocket hit a home on a kibbutz and caused damage, the Israeli army announced.

 

Mr. Meshal said at his news conference that, through Egypt, he and Israel were working on a possible mutual cease-fire or period of calm so there was no reason to accept Mr. Carter’s suggestion of a unilateral cease-fire.

 

Mr. Carter said he found the Hamas leadership, including Mr. Meshal, to be clear-thinking, educated people who gave no sign of fanaticism, although he did condemn in harsh terms their use of violence. He said they did not break for prayer, talk of holy land or God. “It was secular talk,” he said.

 

“They are just as rational as you are,” he said, adding, “The thing that Meshal and I have is that we are both physicists.”

 

Mr. Carter also said that while he was snubbed by the Israeli leadership over his talks with Hamas, he believes it was due to American pressure that meetings between him and top Israeli leaders were canceled.

 

In the interview, Mr. Carter said that what he learned about Syrian intentions toward Israel may prove more significant than the Hamas agreement.

 

He said that Mr. Assad believes there are only a few details left to work out on a full peace treaty but that the Bush administration is discouraging Israel to proceed because of other concerns, especially related to Iraq, that the Americans have with Syria.

 

“All of our group were surprisingly impressed with his strength and knowledge of the details in contrast to what we had heard from propaganda,” Mr. Carter said of the Syrian president. He emphasized that for Syria, a deal with Israel has to be brokered by the United States to be meaningful.

 

While Mr. Assad has an alliance with Iran, Mr. Carter believes that the relationship is as an alternative to one with the United States and the West, rather than his first choice. He said he expected Mr. Assad would be willing to separate from that alliance because he wants full peace with Israel.

 

“He’s willing to put his eggs in that basket of peace with Israel, no matter what Iran thinks,” Mr. Carter said in the interview of Mr. Assad.

Bush said there were wmd's in Iraq....the word of someone isn't worth much until they prove it.

hmm lets see what happens... its deffo put a spanner in the works..

Hamas rejects Israeli recognition

 

"Palestinian militant group Hamas will not recognise Israel, its political leader Khaled Meshaal has insited"

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7359661.stm

Bush said there were wmd's in Iraq....the word of someone isn't worth much until they prove it.

 

Hamas will never recognize Israel, because Hamas is Israeli tool to keep the current devastating status.