Seumas Milne has resonded again to Hirsh on Cif, here.

Judging from his latest post, I'm afraid I'm increasingly sceptical about David Hirsh's attempt to portray himself as a moderate peace camp supporter on Israel/Palestine. Offered the chance to agree with the 64% of Israelis who want to take up Hamas's offer of a truce, he dodges the suggestion, saying he doesn't have a "principle against talking" but is more interested in what would be talked about. Well, start with the truce: for or against?

More telling still is his perverse and contemptible claim that I was "apologizing for, and denying, racism against Jews". I was of course doing the opposite. As I said in my earlier post, the Hamas charter of 1988 was a "reactionary, anti-Jewish document", but it has been repeatedly disavowed in recent years by Hamas leaders, specifically in relation to the anti-Jewish tropes.

Many would certainly interpret Hirsh's surreal insistence that the one-sided 50%-plus civilian Palestinian death rate is evidence of how far Israel goes to avoid killing civilians as a reflection of the low value he (and Israel) places on Palestinian life; and his bizarre insistence that there are no oppressors or oppressed in Israel/Palestine as an example of wilful moral blindness.

It is also of course not difficult to find any number of grossly racist pronouncements about Arabs and Palestinians by Zionist and Israeli leaders -- along with discriminatory law, policy and practice -- from before the foundation of the state to the present day. But, as I presume Hirsh would argue, that's only one part of a complex picture.

In the case of Hamas, to judge its political significance and character mainly through the prism of a 20-year-old document it has explicitly turned its back on -- let alone brand it a "racist organisation" -- is not only grotesquely misleading and wrong, but also helps undermine commitment in Israel and among its supporters for a viable settlement.

Hirsh says "I demonstrate a tremendous ignorance of the Israel-Palestine conflict". I think he means I disagree with him. Of course I'm aware that Israeli public opinion is volatile, includes a large rightwing component and will demand a further escalation in response to, for example, last night's grim revenge atrocity against the settler-linked yeshiva in Jerusalem.

But having spent time in both Israel and the Palestinian territories over a more than 30-year period, it's clear to me - in a way it maybe isn't to Hirsh - that Hamas and the support it attracts is only the current expression of a spirit of Palestinian national resistance to oppression and dispossession going back decades.

In reality, it is as much a nationalist as an Islamist organisation and it has grown in popularity in direct proportion to the failure of Fatah, the PA and the post-Oslo political process to deliver for the Palestinian people over the last 15 years. Many of its activists and supporters are exactly the kind of people who in the past would have been with Fatah, the PFLP and other secular groups. By echoing the US-led attempt to pathologise Hamas -- as was so damagingly done to the PLO in earlier years -- Hirsh is in practice lining up against a viable settlement and the chance of peace for both peoples.

Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne has resonded again to Hirsh on Cif, here.