It was so corrupt that Hamas was able to run on the ticket of anti-corruption, working amongst the grassroots of Palestinian society, delivering at a grassroots level, and earning political credibility not just in terms of handing stuff out, but also in terms of being disciplined, being controlled, being articulate, and standing up, and being seen to stand up for Palestinians when nobody else would.

KB: How should we reconcile Hamas as a force for change with the organization’s history of violence.

PM: Let’s not be churlish about this, call it terrorism. Rather than describe Hamas as a terrorist group, I would say they’re a group that uses terror as a weapon and I think there’s a significant difference there. You’ll find a lot of Israeli commentators, amongst others, can understand and make in their writing. There is a difference there.

But the Palestinian attitude to terror as a weapon is dictated by their sense of the ability to achieve a settlement. If they think there’s a chance that there can be a negotiated settlement, as they did in the aftermath of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s, their view of violence falls. But it’s when they see their land being taken, when they see their water resources being consumed, when they see Gaza being converted into a prison, they believe in violence. It’s a part of the world where all sides are very familiar with the notion of revenge and vengeance.

One of the kernel issues in the Gaza crisis at the moment is the fact that Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal, is a prisoner of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians laugh when they read or hear that Israel is going to war for one man when there are 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. They understand they’re at war. Now how that plays out after this latest round in Gaza, we have yet to see, in terms of public and Palestinian opinion and attitudes to Hamas. They’re going to make a call on whether Hamas overplayed its hand. They’re going to make calls about the standing of Hamas vis-a-vis the standing of Hezbollah after the war in Lebanon in 2006. And that will feed into the political mix of the region.

KB: How should journalists balance these two aspects of the organization to help readers understand?

PM: It’s very difficult, in the helter-skelter, daily evolution of a story like this, to pull in all the relevant bits. And it’s very hard to pull them in particularly, as I said, when the parameters of the narrative are being constructed by the key players, be it the Palestinian leadership, be it the Israeli leadership, be it the regional heavyweights like Egypt, or be it Washington for that matter.

So what you have to be able to do is take the eyes of the big-picture story and be able to infer it, use them as counterpoints in writing. If you tell a foreign readership that this poor soldier is being held in Gaza and he’s been held for years, isn’t this shocking? It is shocking. But is it more or less shocking than the plight or circumstances of the 11,000 Palestinians who are being held in Israeli prisons?

KB: So, how should they describe those individuals? Are they civilian members of Hamas or militants?

PM: Half the elected Hamas government is in prison. So there are Hamas prisoners, there are Hamas sympathizers, there are Hamas militants. You name it, there is every range of them. They’re not all entirely Hamas, but there is a good number of Hamas representatives of the other Palestinian factions and also of Fatah. But every time Israel feels that it needs to make a gesture to the Fatah leadership, what they do is they release a handful of Fatah prisoners—never Hamas prisoners.

KB: My sense has been that everyone who is identified as a member of Hamas is automatically categorized as a member of the militant arm of the organization, as opposed to people who might be part of the public service branch.

PM: That’s very true. In the writing of the narrative, the objective of the spin on all sides is to cast the other side in simple, bad terms. Make it all black, make it all white, try to airbrush out the gray. Now there’s a lot of gray that has to be dealt with and has to be considered.

Look at some of the names of the people who before and after the recent Gaza crisis have said that Hamas has to be allowed a seat at the table, Hamas had to be brought into the negotiating process. You’re talking about people like Efraim Halevy, former head of Mossad. Not a fly-by-night or a shallow man. He makes a very clear and careful distinction between Hamas as national patriots, as opposed to an Al Qaeda-type terrorist group. People like Tony Blair this week, people like Colin Powell before this whole crisis, people like Prince prince Turki Al-Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence, who is not a lightweight in the region.

These are people, and I’m giving you names from all sides there, who have weight and reputation and savvy in their sense of what’s happening on the ground or what needs to happen. But one of the things that has happened in the Middle East for the last sixty years is that people have been talking about what has to happen, and nobody has ever made it happen.

KB: What is the conversation like in Australia?