Word: palestinians
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Those who wonder what impact the landslide Hamas electoral victory will have on "the peace process" are missing the point: There is currently no peace process under way between Israel and the Palestinians, nor has there been for the past five years. Israel says it won't negotiate with an "an armed terror organisation that calls for Israel's destruction," but it's not as if it had really been negotiating with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas before Wednesday's election. Substantive political negotiations between the two sides have not been held since January 2001, shortly before Ariel Sharon was elected...
...hardly surprising that the Palestinian electorate has dispensed with Abbas's party-Sharon had made it abundantly clear that Fatah was irrelevant to the fate of the Palestinians, and Fatah had made it abundantly clear that it had no program beyond waiting in vain for the Americans to intervene. Sharon, meanwhile, pressed ahead with a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and possible follow-ups in the West Bank. Those dramatic moves, however, were never conceived of as steps toward a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. On the contrary, they were drawn up as an alternative to a negotiated settlement, an attempt...
...Hamas and Israel will not negotiate now, or in the near future, although Hamas has given every indication that it plans to maintain their truce with Israel as it undertakes a wholesale cleansing and rebuilding of the corrupt and weakened Palestinian institutions. But when the two sides inevitably meet over a bargaining table-and history's lesson is that when national conflicts are solved in negotiations, those deemed terrorists eventually end up at that table-Israel will find Hamas a far tougher, but also far more credible interlocutor than Arafat ever was. Just as the hard-liner Sharon was widely...
...been shocked by the scale of Hamas's victory, because it was expecting the movement to win no more than about one third of the seats. But Israel is for the time being simply going to watch from the sidelines and see how developments play out on the Palestinian side. It's too soon to tell how the institutions on the Palestinian side are going to be reorganized - will Hamas govern alone, or will it share power? And also whether, and how quickly, there will be changes in the leadership of the Palestinian security apparatus, with which Israel...
...biggest impact of the Palestinian result may be on the Israeli elections scheduled for March. Analysts expect to see the Israeli electorate rally around Ehud Olmert and the Kadima party (of stricken Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), in the way that Israelis do when they sense a possible threat from outside. Voters will want to show support for the acting prime minister and for the security establishment, and that should translate into even bigger gains for Kadima. The most recent polls, before Palestinian result, showed Kadima in the lead, winning around 40 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. But after...