Jonathan Powell Quotes
You should never appease terrorists. The mistake made by critics of the 'talking to your enemy' approach is to equate talking with appeasing.
Powell, Jonathan. Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts. Random House, 2014.
For years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinians would never negotiate with Israel over anything. Finally that barrier was broken and, the PLO became a negotiating party with Israel. However, the terrorist organization Hamas, had challenged the PLO for political control of the Palestinians and then took over the Gaza strip—part of the Palestinian territory. They then shot thousands of rockets into Israel, a clear act of war under international law. The Israelis then attacked the Hamas infrastructure and any building of facility where they had command or communications, meetings, trainings or stored weapons or ammunitions. The Gazans suffered many more casualties than the Israelis—about 20 to 1 ratio. Many other countries tried to broker a ceasefire which the Israelis agreed to but Hamas would not. The Israeli ambassador was asked on American television if Israel would be willing to negotiate on the larger issues of the conflict as they had negotiated with the PLO. This was his reply. The major problem was that the Hamas Charter had two clauses that made negotiations impossible. Hamas was committed to the destruction of Israel and would not agree that the Israel had a right to exist. Second, the Hamas charter called for the killing of Jews anywhere in the world—men, women and children. The Israelis asked what they would negotiate about given those two charter items and the Hamas terror history in killing as many Israelis as they could.
The Chancellor was referring to the United States George W. Bush proposal for war with Iraq.
He had a lifelong hatred toward the Internal Revenue Service. Finally he crashed his single engine airplane into the IRS offices, killing an IRS agent and committing suicide in a different version of suicide bombing.
Erecat was expressing his frustration with the peace negotiations and the lack of progress.
Jonathan Nicholas Powell is a British diplomat who served as the first Downing Street Chief of Staff, under British prime minister Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. He was the only senior adviser to last the whole period of Blair's leadership. During this period Powell was also the chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland.
