BEWARE WHAT POLITICIANS SAY

I may belong to a very small minority of people in this country who thinks that the Hamas victory is a cause for quiet celebration. Simply, it shows that the Palestinians are maturing politically and that must be a good thing. The Israeli, US and European mouthing off about "terrorists" is just that — empty words. Everyone has been caught on the hop with this surprise outcome, but the fact is that Hamas is the legitimate choice of the people and there is no one else to deal with. The sabre rattling is just the noise disguising the deep breathing and fast-thinking that’s going on, including inside Hamas itself.

After twenty years of Fatah corruption and failure to improve the lot of the Palestinians, and with their traditional leader, Yasser Arafat, dead, the people voted in fair and free elections to try a different course. The Hamas men who campaigned for their votes didn’t come dressed in fatigues and armed with Kalash-nikovs, but soberly dressed in suits and armed with sound reasons for a new beginning.

In Trinidad, we use violence for violence sake, that is the worst aspect of our growing crime problem, but the "terrorists" of Palestine, going back farther than Hamas, have used violence, in a war of attrition, to force the Israelis into realising that something had to give and, indisputably, in much less measure than the violence of the Israeli state against unarmed Palestinians. The "terrorists" used the sword to be able to pick up the pen.

This is not new or revolutionary. The very Israelis have come through that process. Menachim Begin who became a Nobel peace prize-winning prime minister was once the notorious leader of the outlawed Irgun that planted a bomb which killed 90 people in Jerusalem in the 1940s and had a British bounty on his head.

The currently ill Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who was found responsible for the 1982 massacre of over 1000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, became a legitimate and effective leader of the Israeli people. And the best example of all is that the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, whose London bombings I personally experienced, is now sitting in Parliament at Westminster, as Sinn Fein, legally representing the people of Northern Ireland. All of them were laundered in free and fair elections. And there are many more examples in history.

We must not be fooled, President Sadat of Egypt made peace with his arch-enemy Menachem Begin, and UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, started talking to the IRA long before any of us knew about it. And for all that time each side kept up the "not doing business with you" rhetoric. Negotiations about how to quell the military wing of organisations such as Hamas and the IRA, what to do with the all the ammunition, how to win hearts and minds, whom to trust, who is able, who must be in or out, who is corrupt, are not easy and quick, and are not just internal.

I shall always remember the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, explaining to me in an interview that long before General Franco died and he assumed the throne, he’d been smuggling into his Madrid palace all the leaders of the disparate interest groups so that when the time came to move from dictatorship and army rule to democracy all these men, called "Fathers of the Constitution", would have already agreed on how Spain had to go forward. Only in that way did Spain resist later military attempts to repeat its awful history and emerge from political darkness to become one of the most liberal and just societies in Europe.

The men who met with the King-in-waiting were not fully convinced that they could trust one another, nor about the ability of the inexperienced Juan Carlos himself. Yet it came to pass that the leader of the Communists openly declared, years later, that he had been wrong in his assertion that the King would last no longer than an ice cream cone in the midday heat.

So I would guess that the suited wing of Hamas has negotiated with its suicide-bombing wing that they continue to respect the current cease-fire and that the Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, who now seems quite likely to win the March elections, are busy accommodating the new reality and planning secret talks with Hamas. And if Netanyahu isn’t, he should read his history, because there is no tomorrow without yesterday, not for any of us.