Those complicit in the siege are now its curious critics

The Gaza blockade is "untenable and unsustainable", says the US president Barack Obama, echoing the sentiments in the corridors of power throughout the West since the flotilla debacle. The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak even ordered the Rafah crossing permanently opened, while the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the blockade "should end once and for all". It's a curious thing, of course, that such sentiments are now coming from quarters long complicit in the siege of Gaza, and committed to its underlying political strategy. The blockade was never a security measure; it was always explicitly part of what the Israelis called "economic warfare", aimed at using collective deprivation of Gaza's civilian population to topple Hamas.

Nor has that strategy been in place only since Hamas drove forces loyal to Fatah out of Gaza in 2007 - it was adopted after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. More than a year before Hamas drove out Fatah security forces, Israel placed economic siege measures that Dov Weisglass, a top aide to then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained were designed "to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger" in order to pressure civilians to turn against the party it had voted into power. Nor was that strategy to reverse the results of the 2006 elections an exclusively Israeli project; it was jointly conceived with the Bush administration, who pressed the EU and other Quartet partners into line. The blockade was enforced with the complicity of Egypt and Fatah, who had their own reasons to seek Hamas's demise.

Despite his promises to work for Middle East peace, Mr Obama embraced his predecessor's boycott of Hamas until it agreed to "renounce" violence, "recognise" Israel and accept all previous agreements made by the PLO (of which it is not a part). This was a position designed to avoid rather than promote engagement with Hamas, because it required the group to make a symbolic surrender straight after it had been embraced by the Palestinian electorate. Mr Obama, by maintaining the Hamas boycott, effectively aligned his administration with the siege strategy, because there's no way to regulate commercial and humanitarian traffic in and out of Gaza without involving Hamas.

Analysts also believe that no peace process can succeed as long as it tries to sidestep the popularity of Hamas and its control over Gaza. While the Obama administration has stayed mum on the question of how it aims to resolve the blockade without rethinking its policy on Hamas, some key figures in the Israeli security establishment were more willing to talk sense. Giora Eiland, the man tapped by Israel to lead its own internal inquiry into the flotilla debacle and a former national security adviser to the formr prime minister Ariel Sharon, stated bluntly last week that it was time for Israel to abandon what he called the "childish" boycott of Hamas and start negotiating with it. That would be the logical response to Israel's security needs in Gaza, he argued, which were a lasting ceasefire, an arrangement to stop weapons smuggled in, and the release of the captive soldier Gilad Shalit.

All three require engaging Hamas. "The main reason for the failure to reach such an agreement [following the last Gaza war] stemmed from an Israeli refusal to negotiate with Hamas combined with our insistence to safeguard Egyptian and Palestinian Authority interests," he said. Coming from a man of impeccable hawkish credentials in Israel, this was a powerful wake-up call. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was the then British ambassador to the UN, echoed the same message. "Hamas are the enemy of Israel, but they do not have to be," Mr Greenstock wrote in the Guardian. "I am convinced from my own direct experience that Hamas is prepared to establish and respect a long-term ceasefire so that the talking can start without the threat of violence, and that they would enter in good faith, if that were reciprocated, into negotiations to establish two states in the disputed territories, Israel and Palestine, with their own rights and responsibilities under international law."

And while the Obama administration maintains that the flotilla debacle reaffirms the importance of making progress in the indirect peace talks it has initiated between Netanyahu and Abbas, Mr Greenstock reminded them that "US policy, based on a West Bank-only approach, is locked in a cul-de-sac if Gaza is left out of the equation, because majority Palestinian support will be lacking." Handled in a more thoughtful way by the West and Israel, Hamas's decision to enter the 2006 elections and run the administrative machinery of the Palestinian Authority would have been an opportunity to integrate the Islamists into some form of peace process, and to press it - via incentives and disincentives - to embrace the pragmatic implications of its decision to govern, and to back away from violence.

The West's sensible response would have been to show Hamas it would be judged by its actions rather than its declarations, maintaining economic and aid ties with Gaza but warning that they would be cut in response to violence. Instead, economic and aid ties were immediately cut, denying the West any leverage, and making Hamas more reliant than ever on the support of those like Iran. The blockade's underlying policy of trying to sideline Hamas rather than integrating it on realistic terms has created an opportunity for the West and Israel to do what they should have in the first place, regardless of the partisan preferences of Mr Mubarak or Fatah.

If they fail to seize the moment, it will be because they were unable to shake off the shackles of a Bush-era policy that was always doomed to fail, and to sabotage any effort to to resolve the conflict. The consequences of such a policy failure will, once again, be borne by hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians. Tony Karon is a New York based analyst who blogs at TonyKaron.com