The Folly of Negotiating with Hamas

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, August 22, 2026

 

Amid the last gasps of an exhausted Republican administration, when it was already obvious that Democrats were cruising toward a smashing November victory that would give them the White House and full control of Congress, George W. Bush traveled to Israel. In his speech to the Knesset, the president decried the “foolish delusion” of politicians who “seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

 

Bush did not mention his soon-to-be successor by name, but as I observed back in the day, Barack Obama was well aware that he was the target. And being the President Obama we all came to know, he first responded with an indignant prevarication — “George Bush knows I have never supported engagement with terrorists” — and then proceeded to make engagement with terrorists his default policy . . . while persisting in indignant denial that this was the case.

 

Elliott Abrams’s great piece earlier this week on the Trump administration’s shameful negotiations with Hamas — even as its equally delusional negotiations with Iran have similarly empowered Tehran’s hardliners — is reminiscent of the wisdom expressed by Bush, whom Elliott so ably served as a seasoned diplomat.

 

As he notes, the Hamas negotiations are being led by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the latter’s spare time from capitalizing on his political connections to enhance his business interests — business closely tied to regimes that have fraught, dependent relationships with the United States government.

 

Even more than the first Trump term, the current iteration is as heedless about conflicts of interest as it is about the ideological commitments of our enemies. It’s all of a piece, really. The White House doesn’t see conflicts of interest because it fancies Trump (he of the multiple bankruptcies) as a boffo business dealmaker, and sees business — commerce — as transcendent. To repeat what I’ve opined before, President Trump not only fails to grasp the sharia supremacist ideology of the Iranian regime, Hamas, the Taliban, et al.; even as he sits in messes of his own making due specifically to cluelessness about how our enemies’ ideology dictates their actions, he doesn’t see the point of trying to understand them. He is biddable, and he calculates that his counterparties are, too. An ideological contest — the West’s principles against Islamist principles — is outside his framework. It’s just another deal, and our enemies’ anti-American, antisemitic, and anti-Western stances are dismissed as so much puffery until we finally arrive at a price to close what can be sold to the public as a spectacular deal.

 

After eight years of Obama, six of Trump, and four of Biden, it seems quaint to complain about the modern bipartisan rescission of the former prudent American policy against negotiating with terrorists. At the risk of falling prey to presentism, Trump’s approach strikes me as more obscene: While he is appeasing Hamas, an entity formally designated under federal law for three decades as a foreign terrorist organization because its operations comfortably fit the U.S. legal definition for terrorist activity, Trump is killing the operators of boats in the Caribbean on the rationalization that he has designated their alleged sponsors as foreign terrorist organizations, even though these designees do not engage in terrorist activity (as federally defined) against the United States — they are suspected of engaging in drug trafficking, a crime which our law does not regard as terrorism, much less an act of war.

 

As Elliott Abrams related, Kushner is dealing face to face with Hamas’s emir-for-now, Khalil al-Hayya (Israel has seen to it that there is not much job security in the position these days). Hayya is a founding member of Hamas. Hence, I thought it might be useful to revisit the 1988 covenant by which Hamas announced its existence.

 

The covenant is an ideological document in which Hamas — “the Islamic Resistance Movement” — explains who it is and why it was established (in late 1987, during the first intifada). As is made unabashedly clear, Hamas does not see itself as a regional group driven by a parochial political agenda:

 

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times.

 

Hence:

 

Those Muslims who adhere to the ways of the Islamic Resistance Movement spread all over the world, rally support for it and its stands, strive towards enhancing its struggle, the Movement is a universal one. It is well-equipped for that because of the clarity of its ideology, the nobility of its aim and the loftiness of its objectives.

 

Hamas elaborates that its specific “struggle against the Zionist invaders” is not strictly confined to Israel, let alone anything as narrow as a particular regime that happens to govern the Jewish state. The target is Jews. “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people,” the covenant proclaims. The jihadists don’t see the conflict as Palestinians versus Israel; it is the Islamic umma (the putative worldwide community of Muslims) against Jews. That’s patent from the opening paragraphs: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”

 

To make the distinction crystal clear, Hamas’s founders invoked Islamic scripture, from the al-Bukhari and Muslim collections of hadiths — the words and actions of the prophet Mohammed, recognized as doctrinal over a millennium before Israel won its independence in 1948 and before “Palestinians” were recognized as a distinct ethnic category:

 

The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, “Oh Muslims, Oh Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

 

This is why Hamas can never be trusted to lay down its arms, renounce violent jihad, and accept a peaceful settlement that abides Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Ironically given Kushner’s current exertions, Hamas resists settlement negotiations with Israel because to negotiate is to accord legitimacy to the counterparty. As a matter of fundamental doctrine, sharia supremacists revile Jews and will never accept a Jewish regime that governs Muslims or what Islamists see as Muslim territory — very much including territory that was the Jewish homeland thousands of years before Islam existed.

 

Of course, our government might have figured this out — that Hamas can only be defeated, not negotiated with — from the Muslim Brotherhood’s robust history of sustaining the Palestinian jihad and undermining every diplomatic effort to end the conflict. But it’s good to be reminded that Hamas jihadists told the world who they were from the very start. Was anyone who has the president’s ear listening?