Is Jimmy Carter a racist, as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman labeled him last week after his trip to Damascus to meet Hamas head Khaled Meshal?

Well, no. Although he has never given the impression of liking Israelis, Israelis do not constitute a race.

Is he gullibly ego-driven? Easily manipulated? A diplomatic shill?

Well, yes.

Mr. Carter’s meeting with Mr. Meshal was not a disgrace because it took place. Although there may be good reasons for refusing to meet with the head of an organization that is a sworn enemy, not only of Israel, but also of America, the country Mr. Carter was once president of, there are no hard-and-fast rules about such things. There can be justifications for talking to enemies.

There can be none, however, for pandering to them, swallowing their lies, and allowing oneself to be used by them. This is exactly what Mr. Carter has done in coming back from Damascus to tell the world that Hamas is prepared to live in peace with Israel, and that he has wrung major concessions from it that could serve as a basis for future negotiations. Any ordinary newspaper reader, which Mr. Carter apparently is not, could have told him he had been hoodwinked.

What are these “concessions”? As a result of his talks with Mr. Meshal, Mr. Carter announced, Hamas is now ready — so the former president put it yesterday in a New York Times op-ed column — to “accept any agreement negotiated by [Palestinian Authority president] Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel provided it is approved either in a Palestinian referendum or by an elected government.”

The “two-state solution,” according to Mr. Carter, is now within reach. All that has to be done is to get Israel and the Palestinian Authority to hammer out an agreement, which Hamas, traditionally the leader of the “rejectionist” camp within Palestinian ranks, now pledges not to reject.

But this is nonsense. Had Mr. Carter been minimally informed, he would have known that Hamas has for years been ready to “accept” a Palestinian state subject to certain conditions — which is what it means when it says that this state must be approved by a Palestinian “referendum” (to be torpedoed by Hamas if its conditions are not met) or a Palestinian “elected government” (ditto). These conditions, which Mr. Carter did not get Hamas to retreat from one iota, are, firstly, that Israel pull back to its 1967 lines with Jordan, including those that divided Jerusalem, and, secondly, that Israel admit all descendants of 1948 Palestinian refugees who wish to live within its borders.

What Hamas has not been ready to accept, is still not ready to accept, and has never told Mr. Carter is that it is ready to accept is the state of Israel itself. At the most it is willing to agree to a hudna, an Islamic truce, with Israel. And as any student of Islam knows, a hudna is by definition temporary. It can be for a longer time or a shorter time, but it is basically a breather separating one round of confrontation with the infidel from another.

To put it in plain language: Once Israel agrees to surrender half of Jerusalem, uproot hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers from disputed territories beyond the 1967 lines, and grant residence rights to possibly millions of Palestinians who have never lived in it before, Hamas will call off its campaign for the Jewish state’s destruction for X number of years, after which it will be free to resume hostilities.

By then, of course, there will be little left of a Jewish state to destroy, the influx of Palestinian refugees having eliminated the country’s Jewish majority. These are the “concessions” that Mr. Carter, with his self-vaunted skills as a negotiator, has managed to extract from Hamas and is now trying to peddle as a significant achievement.

Mr. Carter has been taken — not for the first time in his career, it must be said — for a ride. Were he alone in the delusion that Hamas can be brought into Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as a constructive partner, this would not matter very much. In the three-ring circus of Middle Eastern diplomacy, he simply would be one more clown balancing bowling pins on his nose or pedaling a unicycle backwards.

But the delusion is more widespread. It is being voiced today from more and more quarters. Without Hamas, the argument goes, no Israeli-Palestinian process is possible; ergo, Hamas must become part of the process for it to succeed.

Now, the first half of this argument is certainly correct. Hamas is politically and militarily strong enough today, not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank as well, to thwart any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that it does not approve of. It is just that the “ergo” does not follow, for the simple reason that Hamas cannot and will not approve of any agreement that could possibly be acceptable to Israel. It does not have the ideological leeway or flexibility to do so, and no one can say that it has not been ideologically consistent over the years.

Does this mean that no Israeli-Palestinian peace process can succeed at the moment? Alas, this is precisely what it does mean. Some of those who, like Mr. Carter, find it impossible to live with this truth will go on making fools of themselves in order to deny it. Let’s just not let them make fools of us.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.