By IRNA,
London : A leading British daily Tuesday applauded former US president Jimmy Carter for defying the Bush Administration and Israeli regime by holding talks with Hamas, the largest party in the Palestinian Authority.
Carter was ‘right to have held two long talks last week with Khaled Meshal, the most influential leader of Israel’s most resolute and dangerous enemy’, the Financial Times said.
His talks in Damascus elicited the clearest indication that Hamas could ‘live as a neighbor next door in peace’ with Israel, provided Palestinians get their independent state on all the territories seized by Israel in the 1967 six-day war, an FT editorial said.
“Carter’s perception, shared by two thirds of Israelis, is that Israel cannot make war on half the Palestinian people and expect to make peace with the other half; if there is ever going to be a solution to this conflict, Hamas has to be part of it.”
The daily criticized the international boycott and attempted isolation Hamas since it won the last Palestinian elections in 2006 as ‘destructive and myopic’.
“The demand that Hamas should first accept an Israel in a constant state of expansion is unreal and unjustified,” it said in differing from the policy of the British government.
Despite its continual military siege of Gaza in defiance of international law, the UK government has moved to improve its ties with Israel by opening an annual ‘strategic dialogue’ with the Zionist regime earlier this month.
Britain also rejected a call last August from the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select to urgently consider ways of engaging with Hamas, saying the international boycott had proved to be a ‘failure’.
In its report on ‘Global Security: The Middle East’, the all- party committee also warned that the UK’s reputation was damaged when the British government hesitated in calling for an immediate end to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006.