He has an op-ed in this week's current Newsweek magazine entitled "Why Fatah is Not the Answer". In it he insists, ready for this?, that Israel and the Middle East Quartet engage Hamas.
I presume, of course, that this English gentleman is referring to a verbal engagement.
Here's what he writes:
No solution to this dispute will be possible until the centers of gravity in Israeli and Palestinian public opinion move within touching distance of each other...
...But Hamas is a political-grievance-based entity—not an ideological one. This truth has been overlooked in the West. Faced with the prospect that its main grievance—the dispossession of the Palestinian people—could eventually be removed and a viable Palestinian state established, Hamas might finally recognize that no settlement is possible unless Israeli security gets the same priority as justice for the Palestinians. At the very least, this avenue should be properly tested before it is rejected. Direct engagement could leave a bitter taste in many mouths, but it would still be preferable to despair and violence.
(by the way, a search of Ditchley for "Hamas" draws a blank)
If we follow his logic, Great Britain should have been negotiating with the underground Irgun and Lechi groups in pre-state mandated Palestine instead of hanging them, hunting them and exiling them.
Actually, too bad Greenstock's logic was missing in those days. Israel (tongue-in-cheek) would have been most probably on the Jordan River's bank already from 1948.
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