That brought to mind the event last year when Thomas Pickering had a secret meeting with Hamas. When that was reported in the press, Obama denied Pickering was working for him. Pickering served as Reagan's Ambassador to Israel so I guess it would be possible that Pickering was working for Israel. Either way, somebody is talking to Hamas.
Pickering belongs to the Realist-Pragmatist school of foreign policy and that group subscribes to the theory of "Linkage", that there are many problems in the mideast that are linked to the Israel-Palestine problem and can't be solved until the Palestine-Israel problem is solved.
One could draw a conclusion from the above article that Patraeus is a realist.