Hamas is ready to talk

We welcome the call for dialogue, and reject insincere demands for an undemocratic boycott

Mousa Abu Marzook
(deputy chief of the Hamas political bureau)
Thursday August 16, 2007
The Guardian

"While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is busily courting Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas as a "partner for peace", successive voices continue to speak out against efforts to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government. As the Britain's Commons foreign affairs committee concluded on Monday, this strategy is counterproductive and doomed to fail, for the simple reason that the support of the Palestinian people is unmistakably lacking. Abbas's party does not democratically represent the Palestinians, yet what is in effect now a dictatorship in the West Bank is being welcomed by Israel and its western allies. The duplicity of this situation is shameful. Israel and its allies were quick to dismiss Hamas and the national unity governments and isolate both, and are now equally as quick to welcome an illegally formed self-proclaimed government for the Palestinians. Is this democracy?.....

While Ehud Olmert laments the so-called absence of a partner for peace, the illegal separation wall continues to be built, money is withheld from the Palestinian people, settlements are built apace and the blockade of the West Bank and Gaza continues. If Olmert really considers Abbas a true partner for peace, one must question why he is still refusing to discuss the substantive issues of border, refugees and Jerusalem. Israel's actions, in defiance of its international obligations, evince not an appetite to peace but an attempt to use Abbas to manipulate the Palestinian population and win more time for its strategy of further illegal expansion, to ensure that no coherent Palestinian state can be established......

Those who demand the boycott of Hamas repeat flimsy accusations that cannot withstand non-partisan scrutiny. They do so because they want a Palestinian "peace" partner who will not endanger Israel's expansionist aspirations. This is not diplomacy; this is bigotry.

The Palestinians have been abandoned by the international community. The cruelty of this treatment will go down in history. It is time to create a new history for the region, and to recognise the real representatives of the Palestinian people."