Shlomo Ben Ami: No Peace Without Syria, Hamas, or Marwan Barghouti

March 13, 2008 (LPAC)-All the strategies that Israel has pursued under different governments since the 1990's to achieve peace with security have failed, said former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami in Washington today. Therefore Israel must recognize that what it has, so far, refused to contemplate, must be tried.

Ben Ami, who was also a former Labor Party member of the Knesset and Foreign Minister in the government of Ehud Barak in 2000 and 2001, during remarks to the New America Foundation, March 13. The framework that Ben Ami presented included three elements that would be anathema to most neo-conservatives in the United States, and probably many right-wing Israelis, as well, but he insisted that peace would be impossible without them.

First, Syria must be engaged. “You can't reach a settlement with the Palestinians by discarding totally the Syrians,” he said, because the Syrians have leverage over the Palestinians and can act as spoilers.

Second, no agreement is possible by excluding Hamas, for the simple reason that Hamas, by reason of its 2006 election victory, "represents the democratic majority of Palestinians," Ben Ami said. "To run a peace process that does not take into account Hamas is not a wise way to go about it," he said.

Third, while Abbas has legitimacy as the elected President of the Palestinians, "the revolutionary legitimacy of [the imprisoned] Marwan Barghouti or the heads of the militias are perhaps even more important to legitimize an agreement than the democratic legitimacy of Abu Mazen," Ben Ami said. He said that Abu Mazen "will need Barghouti and will need to co-opt Hamas if he wants a legitimate deal." This can only happen if the Palestinians are allowed to solve their own internal divisions, which means that Abbas should be allowed to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas.

Ben Ami sees the Annapolis process as a "window of opportunity" for peace, but he warned that the two-state solution is losing its popularity among the Palestinians. "They have been in this process since 1993 with no results," he said. "They've been given many promises about the future, about the two-state solution, which didn't materialize. They have lost trust in this."