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US commentators call for talks with Hamas if Israel really wants peace


Joe Klein of Time magazine in an interview with Mashaal shortly after Obama's Cairo speech, calls on the US to start talking to Hamas.

See his article in Time magazine here.
So what are our options, given Mashaal's refusal to yield on any of the demands made by Obama? Hamas has some inconvenient facts in its favor: it exists, it remains strong in Gaza — as a direct consequence of the real social services it provides and its relative lack of corruption compared with Fatah — and it has a legitimate complaint. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is inhumane and outrageous. Palestinians are imprisoned behind a barrier wall that does not conform to the 1967 lines; they are forced to endure hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks whose purpose seems humiliation as much as security; their lands are slit by highways that only settlers are allowed to use; the settlements, populated by the most extreme Israelis, have doubled in size since the 1993 Oslo accords, gradually turning the Palestinian areas into Swiss-cheese cantons.

There will be no peace as long as this persists. And there will be no peace without Hamas as part of the process..

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