In this week’s Spectator, I have written an article about the way Hamas manipulated the kidnap of Alan Johnston to its enormous advantage by duping the west, aided and abetted by an unsavoury groundswell of elite opinion that the same west should now be bringing Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood in from the cold in order to ‘engage’ with them. The idea that anyone can think it is anything less than unutterable irresponsibility and suicidal folly to ‘engage’ with people whose agenda is totally non-negotiable —what’s to talk about? – is deeply dismaying, not least because of the fact that such talk itself strengthens the enemies of the free world.

Now the latest big name to join this swelling appeasement chorus has revealed himself. Sir Jeremy Greenstock is the former British Ambassador to the UN and now director of the Ditchley Foundation. In an article in Newsweek, he claims that the Israel/Palestinian stalemate can be broken.

But let’s be clear about one thing. Engaging the Palestinians means engaging Gaza and Hamas. Fatah has been drained of credibility as a negotiating partner, and no amount of money and attention poured in from North America or Europe will compensate for that… That’s not to suggest it will be easy to work with Hamas, a hard-line group with a history of violence. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s statehood as a precondition for negotiations (something the Israelis and Americans have insisted on). But Hamas is a political-grievance-based entity—not an ideological one. This truth has been overlooked in the West. Faced with the prospect that its main grievance—the dispossession of the Palestinian people—could eventually be removed and a viable Palestinian state established, Hamas might finally recognize that no settlement is possible unless Israeli security gets the same priority as justice for the Palestinians. At the very least, this avenue should be properly tested before it is rejected. Direct engagement could leave a bitter taste in many mouths, but it would still be preferable to despair and violence.

It is Sir Jeremy’s astounding ignorance and prejudice that are the real cause for despair. Hamas is not a ‘political-grievance-based entity’ because, contrary to Sir Jeremy’s assertion, ‘the Palestinian people’ was not dispossessed — for the very good reason that a) they were not ‘a people’ because there never was a ‘Palestinian people’, but merely Arabs who lived in pre-Israel Palestine b) they were not ‘dispossessed’ because they never possessed it in the first place.

And the idea that Hamas is not ‘ideological’ is ludicrous. Its aim is the Islamisation of the region. Its ‘grievance’ is the existence of the Jews. Has Sir Jeremy never read the Hamas charter? For that deranged document is straight out of the Nazi nightmare, stating in terms that the Jews are a cosmic conspiracy behind every single event the authors regard as bad (such as capitalism, communism and the formation of the UN). How does any civilised person ‘engage’ with that?

Sir Jeremy presents Hamas as rational people with a grievance. Sir Jeremy is presumably not a fool. He has held important public offices in the life of the British nation. How can such a man be so ignorant? How can such a man be so dangerously, egregiously misguided? And how can our society ever hope to defeat those who wish to destroy it when men who help shape its destiny seem hell-bent on helping them to do so?