Should Israel and/or its allies talk to men like these, the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas, who run the Gaza Strip?

That’s a question that has been revived this week following the end of Israel’s 22-day war in Gaza, which left Hamas rule apparently intact and 1.5 million people in desperate need, and the arrival in the White House of President Barack Obama, who has indicated he might be willing to talk to people his predecessor George W. Bush had shunned.

For now, it looks like talking about talking may be as far as it goes, as we examined in a story earlier in the week. Israel is conducting discussions through Egyptian mediators on prolonging its ceasefire, but is not interested in talking to a movement which rejects the agreements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his PLO to accept Israel’s right to exist. Nor are Hamas leaders willing to give Israel the implicit recognition that opening formal negotiations would give - though they do not rule out some contact.

Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and new Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who notably negotiated an end to IRA violence in Northern Ireland, have given no sign they are about to break radically with the Bush administration’s policies in the region for now, as my colleague Jonathan Wright examined today. Obama notably made his first call to regional leaders on Wednesday to Abbas, a sign many saw of a continued determination to support the secular leader in the West Bank against the movement which defeated his Fatah party in a 2006 parliamentary election and seized full control in Gaza the following year. Obama on Thursday repeated three long-standing conditions, agreed upon by the Quartet of mediating powers, for the boycott of Hamas to end.

And yet, and yet. There is talk about talks. This is notably in Europe, where governments who rallied behind Israel after it ceased fire in Gaza on Jan. 18 also face disquiet among their electorates about the fate of Gazans blockaded into their tiny enclave and denied access to basic reconstruction supplies, like cement and steel piping, after a war that killed some 1,300 and left tens of thousands homeless.  Israel fears such material will be used by Hamas to rearm, including building the rockets with which it has peppered southern Israel for years. But the embargo is taking a toll on ordinary people too. As regional political analyst Mouin Rabbani put it to me: “”The Europeans and other donors, now have a problem. Are you going to say ‘Let them eat cake?’”

It is perhaps significant that, in a speech declaring “victory” in Gaza, Hamas’s exile leader Khaled Meshaal appeared specifically to address Europeans in urging talks: “I tell European nations,” he said in Damascus, “It is time for you to deal with Hamas.” Hamas officials made clear to Reuters that the offer of talks was one specifically to international powers, not to Israel.

To look in more detail at the arguments of those who say it is time to talk to Hamas, one might listen to a speech in the British parliament last week by Gerald Kaufman, a former minister and prominent Jewish supporter of Israel who has been highly critical of recent Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Likening the offensive in Gaza to Nazi atrocities, he said: “”Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas … has been a culpable error … You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

French analyst Olivier Roy wrote in the Saudi Gazette this week that it is “time to consider that option” of talking to Hamas. He criticised the Bush administration for what he said was an approach that did not distinguish between enemies like al Qaeda, which have irreconcilable global ambitions, and those like Hamas, which he described as “nothing else than the traditional Palestinian nationalism” - a movement with goals that might be susceptible to negotiation. “The concept of a “war on terror” has thwarted any political approach to the conflicts in favor of an elusive military victory,” Roy wrote.

Another Frenchman taking a close interest in the issue is Yves Aubin de la Messuziere, a retired senior diplomat who twice visited Hamas leaders in Gaza last year. He and the French government have been keen to stress these were private, “research” visits. But the former ambassador has been speaking out strongly for what he sees as an inevitable need to negotiate with Hamas, despite Israel’s distaste for a group it sees as a proxy of its foes in Iran and the perpetrator of dozens of suicide bombings in Israeli cities in the early part of this decade. He developed the theme in some detail in a Web chat hosted by Le Monde newspaper this month and in an interview with Nouvel Observateur magazine , which provides its own English translation.  The diplomat argues that Hamas’s political leadership is capable of negotiations. ”Dialogue … will happen, because Hamas is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said. “If Obama truly wants to be the American president who resolved  this conflict, there will have to be a dialogue with Hamas.”

For a rundown on the opposite view, and one generally shared by the Israeli leaders contesting a general election in just over two weeks, take a look at a blog by former Bush aide David Frum for the National Post. Frum notes the way talk about talks with Hamas is bubbling away behind the scenes, especially in the chancelleries of Europe. And that worries him: ”Starting talks with a group that has not first disavowed violence is an invitation to even more violence,” he said, citing among examples the behaviour of the IRA during a peace process that involved, notably, George Mitchell.  ”Advocates of talks with terrorists often present themselves as pragmatists,” said Frum. “Not so. They are guided by unstated biases and pure wishful thinking.”

The calculations down the decades by governments around the world with armed enemies that oppose them have always been complex and fraught with moral arguments, between the hope that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war” and fear of appeasement and “rewarding terrorism”. This is the fine art of diplomacy mostly conducted behind closed doors. What is, perhaps, more striking then, amid all this cautious and rather technical talk of talking about talks, is some passionate talking from a relatively few Israelis, and Palestinians, of a more profound need to talk, without conditions, simply to try to find some common ground between two peoples who seem locked in endless struggle. While Gaza’s rubble was still smouldering, one of Israel’s most celebrated writers, David Grossman, seized the front-page of the left-leaning daily newspaper Haaretz to pen an impassioned entreaty for dialogue.

“We must speak to the Palestinians … We must speak also to those who do not recognise our right to exist here,” wrote Grossman, author of See under: Love and a veteran peace campaigner who lost a soldier son in Israel’s last war, in Lebanon in 2006. “Instead of ignoring Hamas … we would do better to take advantage of the new reality that has been created by beginning a dialogue with them immediately.”

“We must speak, even if dialogue seems hopeless from the start,” he wrote. “We must speak out of understanding, born as we look out at the horrible devastation, as we grasp that the harm we are capable of inflicting on each other … is so enormous and so destructive and so utterly senseless, that if we surrender to it and accept its logic, it will end up destroying us all.”

Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if the shield is deployed.

That phrase could have come straight out of the Soviet lexicon and seems more at home in the second half of the last century than now. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer called it psychological pressure to try to encourage opposition to the missile system among Europeans, and described it as “the same sort that was used in the 1980s by the Soviet Union when the United States deployed cruise missiles in Europe.”

We are, of course, a long way from the tensions of the Cold War. But the dispute is reminiscent of the war of words between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s over another missile defence system — the Strategic Defence Initiative proposed by Ronald Reagan. His dream of a partly space-based missile system, otherwise known as Star Wars after George Lucas’ 1977 film, never became a reality but the row over it plagued Soviet-U.S. relations for years.

The disagreement over the missile defence system that George W. Bush now wants to be partly based in Europe risks having a similar impact on U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps fittingly, it has been referred to as Son of Star Wars.

I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s when the dispute over Star Wars was at its height. The disagreements were clear. Reagan wanted to deploy a multi-billion-dollar land- and space-based shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the programme would disrupt the nuclear balance and fuel an arms race in space, and expressed  hope that Europe would not become “a testing-ground for the Pentagon’s doctrines of a limited nuclear war”. 

The disagreement led to the collapse of a 1986 superpower summit in Iceland.

When I was back in Moscow in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were at loggerheads over U.S. plans for a Star Wars-style missile defence umbrella, even though Clinton had pulled the plug on Star Wars in 1993. Moscow said plans to develop the new missile defence system would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement Moscow saw as a cornerstone of global security.

Similar issues hung over Vladimir Putin’s presidency and now threaten to strike a severe blow to hopes of an improvement in U.S.-Russian ties at the very start of Medvedev’s presidency.

Washington says it needs a missile defence system based partly in Europe to provide protection against any attack on  European or U.S. targets by rogue states such as Iran, which tested new long- and medium-range missiles on Wednesday. Russia says the missiles could threaten its own defences and might become a bigger threat over time it if the system expanded.

In the 1980s, Moscow was worried about a project that would have based missiles outside the former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It is now concerned about a system that would be even closer to home. A radar tracker is to be placed on Czech soil and, if a deal is reached with Warsaw, 10 interceptor missiles could be installed in Poland. Both Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia were members of the Warsaw Pact.

If Poland does not reach an agreement with the United States, Lithuania has been suggested an alternative site for the interceptors. That would be an even less welcome prospect for Moscow because the Baltic state was part of the Soviet Union. Little surprise, then, that Medvedev took a firm line on the issue in comments he made at the group of Eight summit in Japan.

But Moscow could risk shooting itself in the foot by reverting to rhetoric that harks back to the Cold War. Michal Kaminski, an aide to Polish President Lech Kaczynski said on Wednesday Russia’s reaction was unacceptable. He said it showed Poland should “strengthen our alliance with the United States because beyond our eastern border there are politicians who use a language we thought had vanished many years ago, the language of might and imperial ambitions.”
 
   

Berlin has had a deep and enduring love affair with American presidents. Berliners have never forgotten the U.S. leaders who helped keep West Berlin free during the Cold War with the Airlift and many can still recite the words of John F. Kennedy’s  legendary “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at City Hall in 1963.
 
So it is all the more glaring that George W. Bush has once again avoided the German capital on his fifth and final visit  to the country , spending just minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany.
 
It was also odd that Bush failed to mention the Airlift, one of the brightest moments of post-war U.S. foreign policy, at his news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in the rural village of Meseberg (pop. 150) about 100 km (60 miles) north of  the capital. The Airlift’s 60th anniversary is being marked this month and was supposed to be the reason for Bush’s visit.
 
Perhaps  it was the memories of 10,000 anti-war protesters who disrupted Bush’s first and only stay in Berlin in May 2002. Or maybe it was the recollections of the 10,000 German police needed to guard him in the centre of Berlin, which he turned into a veritable ghost town. Bush lamented about “living in a bubble” when he was here for 20 hours in 2002. His next trip was to Mainz, a provincial city in the far west — there were anti-war protests there too. After that he went to small northeastern villages in 2006 and 2007 — but stayed clear of Berlin.
 
The reason is clear — Iraq. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won re-election against long odds in 2002 by standing up to Bush on Iraq, a hugely popular position in war-scarred Germany that nevertheless got him ostracised by Bush.
 
Differences were later patched up, but even Bush acknowledged in Meseberg on Wednesday: “It’s obviously been a contentious issue between our countries in the past.”
 
Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper columnist Kurt Kister wrote: “Bush is spending his entire visit hidden away in the provincial town of Meseberg. Meseberg has the advantage that it’s easy to seal it off from the rest of the world with fences
and police. It’s not surprising because for the overwhelming majority of Germans Bush is the most unpopular U.S. president in the last two generations.”
 
As an American who’s lived in Berlin for much of the past 15 years, I have felt at first hand the city’s affinity for all things American. In 1994, I saw tears running down the cheeks of American GIs, overwhelmed by 250,000 cheering Berliners giving them a
thunderous farewell, as  the city’s Cold War defence force marched in a farewell parade .
 
And I have seen the tens of thousands that lined  the streets to cheer Bill Clinton in 1993, when he became the first U.S.  president to walk through the Brandenburg Gate, and in 1998 when he came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Airlift. Clinton even went for jogs in the city’s Tiergarten park and dropped into trendy restaurants with only minimal protection.
 
So, after watching Bush avoid Berlin for the fourth time and knowing how fond Berliners are of America, I’m wondering what’s next. Will the next U.S. president be able to or want to walk the streets of Berlin again? Will that perhaps be a useful barometer?  What does it say  about the state of international affairs if the world’s most powerful leader doesn’t feel welcome and safe in a city that, in many ways, owes its very survival to U.S. presidents?