Israel Council on Foreign Relations
photo: AP
Former US president Jimmy Carter has said that Hamas is prepared to accept the right of Israel to "live as a neighbor next door in peace". After meeting Hamas leaders last week in Syria, he said it was a problem that the US and Israel would not meet the group. Speaking in Jerusalem after completing his tour in the Middle East, Carter said Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking had "regressed" since the US hosted the Annapolis conference in November last year.
The former US president was strongly criticized by many leaders from the US and Israel for meeting the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus last week. However, Carter defended his visit. Addressing the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, Carter said: "The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria. The problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet with someone who must be involved." Carter claimed that Hamas had reiterated its position that it would accept an Israeli state within its pre-1967 borders, living in peace with Israel, if such an agreement was approved by Palestinians in a referendum.
Carter told the BBC: "Hamas indicated to us at least – I'm not guaranteeing their commitment – that if Israel is willing to have a mutual ceasefire and a renunciation of violence in Gaza and in the West Bank, they will accept it, and as a first step they would even accept just limiting that to Gaza. So I think that what they have said, if they were honest and we wrote it out so there wouldn't be a mistake, it's a very significant development."
Hamas leader Mashaal said his movement would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state based on borders prior to the 1967 war (i.e. in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), but he added that Hamas was not prepared to recognize Israel as a state. An attempt by Carter to get Hamas to declare a truce also failed. "I did the best I could," Carter said of his last-minute attempt to change Mashaal's mind on rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. "They turned me down, and I think they are wrong," he was quoted as saying by the AP news agency.
An Israeli Defense Ministry official, Amos Gilad, said Hamas had not offered anything new during Carter's meetings with its leaders and that the mission had failed.
