The Centre For Social Cohesion

The baroness made her comment about Lord Hannay after he had admitted, during his contribution to the debate, having been ‘really shocked’ to learn that two successive Secretary Generals of the UN had forbidden Alvaro de Soto UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process from speaking to leaders of Hamas because of its refusal to recognise the State of Israel and to renounce violence against Israel.

‘If we have learnt anything from our experience in Northern Ireland, it was surely that exclusion does not advance the cause of peace’, Lord Hannay had remarked during the debate. Not resisting a thinly-veiled swipe at the White House, this former Foreign Office mandarin who specialised in the Middle East continued:

‘We must not fall into that heresy, which is so prevalent on the banks of the Potomac, that one only talks to one’s adversaries when they have fulfilled a whole list of onerous preconditions; that contact with us is something for which they have to make substantive concessions. Should we not be putting that sort of appeal behind us?’

Sadly, Baroness Royall would seem to have overestimated Lord’s Hannay’s powers of understanding. For he is a member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House of Lords European Union Committee, that today published a report, entitled ‘The EU Middle East Peace Process’, which calls on the EU to drop its insistence Hamas recognises Israel, as well as renounces violence, as preconditions for the EU being willing to talk to it.

Clearly, Lord Hannay thinks insisting Hamas recognise Israel is demanding too much of it before making it a negotiating partner in any comprehensive Middle East peace settlement. The folly of such a view has been well explained by the author of the following anonymous comment (number 95) on a posting about the matter on the Little Green Footballs website:

‘If the UK and the European Union go wobbly on requiring Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, then the "2-state solution" that they are seeking to set up will involve a Palestinian state that is irredentist and engaged in unending war against Israel.

‘The point of requiring Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, to recognize Israel's legitimacy and its permanence, and to teach that to Palestinian schoolchildren, is to make it more difficult to wage endless war against Israel. Ignore that requirement, and it facilitates irredentism, and endless war against Israel. What kind of "solution" is that?’

Contrary to what Lord Hannay and his fellow committee members would appear to think, now is decidedly not the time for the Quartet to start to make concessions to Hamas. For, even in Gaza, support for that organisation is beginning to drain away as its true barbarous nature is becoming ever more clearly revealed.

Melanie Phillipps has drawn attention to a recently published poll of Gaza residents that shows that, since its forcible take-over from Fatah there, support for Hamas has fallen to 23%, while support for Fatah has risen to 43%.

Only members of our own House of Lords are seemingly beginning to warm to Hamas.

Mind you, as one involved in the negotiations that led to Britain’s entry into the EU, to have expected from Lord Hannay any better exercise of political judgment was perhaps expecting too much.