Has the US changed its tone towards Ismail Haniyehs Hamas?
A number of commentators, including Al Jazeera’s Clayton Swisher, have remarked of late on the apparent willingness of the Obama administration to permit a level of unofficial contact with senior Hamas officials. They refer to discussions which reportedly took place last summer in Zurich, when Tom Pickering, a former undersecretary of state, and Rob Malley, a former advisor to the Clinton administration on Arab-Israeli affairs, met for informal talks with Mahmud Zahar, the Hamas foreign minister. Neither of the Americans involved has any official status in the current administration, but it was apparently understood by their Hamas interlocutor that they would brief officials in Washington on the substance of their discussions. And in February, a career US diplomat, Rachel Schneller, who is currently out-of-status and on loan to the council on foreign relations, was permitted by the state department to participate in a panel discussion in Doha which included Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan
