Joe emails:
Well, there is your change. After a no-b.s. policy under which Hamas was not offered a seat at the table, Obama will take a listen, because that is what a good appeaser does.
Now, of course, to be fair, everyone and their uncle talked to the PLO all the while denying it. Hell, Israel was having slumber parties in Oslo with the PLO while denying that direct talks were occurring. But, as they say, this time it is different.
The PLO was a political enemy of Israel. The PLO played by the niceties of post-Holocaust Jew treatment. The PLO was about fulfilling the political dreams of the Palestinian "people" and not an inch more. Once they confined that dream to a two-state nonviolent solution, the US opened up a small dialogue in 1988. In 1991, when the PLO was caught trying to do an amphibious landing in Tel Aviv, George H.W. Bush cut off ties. After that, it became clear, that the PLO was not about posing an existential threat to Israel at this exact moment. Talking to it in private was a reasonable idea (I do not say good – it has been a complete unmitigated disaster, but no one’s hindsight is perfect).
With Hamas, there has been no such domestication or test periods. Hamas has to do nothing to be offered the lovely drinking water supplied on a marble table in the US embassy in Cairo. Hamas can keep its murderous charter, it can keep its rockets, tunnels and absolute sovereignty from any rule of international law, including that small rule about not having a charter that calls for genocide against Jews that has been canon since around 1945 or so. No, all Hamas needed was a left wing government in the US that views anything that Bush did as completely worthless.
Make no mistake. Negotiating with Hamas without Hamas getting on bended knee weakens Israel. Obama could care less, and I would bet the same can be said of the 75% of Jews who voted for Obama. And do not give me the canard that you talk to your enemies or you talk to no one. You talk to your enemies when they have made the first gesture of being open to accommodation. Otherwise, you fight your enemies. All that Hamas has done is comply with a six month truce in which they accumulated more rockets than Oprah has belly fat.
