Bronwen Maddox, director and chief executive of the Chatham House think-tank, last week republished an interview she conducted in 2007 when she was The Times foreign editor with Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas leader killed in a drone strike in Lebanon last week.
The most striking words from the interview were: “Our job is to keep the Palestinians radicalised. Most of them would settle in a moment for peace, some deal that will let them get on with their lives. We need to keep them angry.”
This is on top of clear words in Hamas’s (still unamended Arabic version) charter that unashamedly rejects any solution not ending with a caliphate and calls for the genocide of Jews.
Monday’s Financial Times leader article “The tinder box in the Middle East” (FT View, January 8) ends with a blast at Israel, that no diplomatic solution is likely to succeed “as long as Israel is bombing and besieging Gaza”.
Tell me, which diplomatic solution with Hamas intact, funded by Qatar, the EU and the UN, will succeed when its key aim remains to unashamedly reject and destroy any diplomatic peace solution and keep the population from agreeing to it?
The only chance of any diplomatic solution is without Hamas.
Elliot Renton
London N3, UK
