Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Zahar and Carter Start Talking

Mr. Zahar and Mr. Carter – washingtonpost.com
Mr. Zahar lauds Mr. Carter for the “welcome tonic” of saying that no peace process can succeed “unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.” Yet Mr. Zahar has his own preconditions: Before any peace process can “take even its first tiny step,” he says, Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders and evacuate Jerusalem while preparing for the “return of millions of refugees.”

The Washington Post’s editorial writer needs to spend a little more time reading carefully and a little less time sharpening her righteous indignation.

Zahar said there should be no preconditions to “sitting at the negotiation table”, he didn’t say he has no conditions on what he considers a workable peace agreement. Indeed, both the United States and Israel have conditions of their own as far as what they would consider an acceptable outcome to discussions with Hamas. Obviously, if Zahar is sitting down to talk with Jimmy Carter, he didn’t mean to imply that he was unwilling to even talk without Israel first withrawing to the 1967 borders. Quite the contrary, it’s typically been representatives of the US government who have been too bull-headed to even pull up a chair without “preconditions” having been met.

Jimmy Carter is a very wise man and he understands that there can be no lasting peace unless people are willing to simply talk — talk without preconditions. Diplomacy must start with talking. And talking and talking and talking until — eventually — you find something the two sides can agree on. It may take months or even years, but it will happen. And then you’ve got something to start building on.

It’s the only way.

But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.

Refusing to “recognize” Zahar would be absurd. He’s a major player in the Middle East. The fact that he’s a terrorist doesn’t make him any less of one. And, while Zahar is a terrorist, he is first of all a human being and where there’s humanity, there’s a way through to communication.

Refusing to talk with people like Zahar is exactly the sort of thing that got us in our current, completely screwed up, situation in the Middle East.