Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

In the greater Middle East that the neoconservatives had set out to reconfigure violently, the pace of diplomacy has picked up a new momentum.

Its aim seems to go beyond a simple desire to limit the damage done by that misconceived project and all the principal regional actors, acting singly or in like-minded sub-groups, are seeking to encourage some transformations that they consider desirable and inhibit others that are deemed undesirable, often from a national viewpoint.

The air is thick with the promise and peril discerned in a fluid situation by regional states. It is by no means certain that the grave crisis faced by the Palestinians would receive the emphasis it deserves in the current jockeying for influence and power.

What adds to uncertainty is the absence of a coherent process, even a forum where contending agendas could be properly prioritised and reconciled.

Amongst the many oversimplifications with which the invasion of Iraq was justified was the calculation that a military victory there would by itself compel the Palestinians to accept whatever terms Israel would offer to them.

Israel's convergence plan was built upon this calculation and demonstrated once again its inherent inability to grasp the dynamics of a just peace. Instead, it embarked upon the destruction of Hezbollah and having failed to do so regressed into the policy of tightening the brutal siege of Palestine.

The six-day offensive against Beit Hanoun dramatised this atavistic aspect of Israeli political imagination. The scale of atrocity, however, was a clear reminder that no matter how complex the interplay of the interests of the Arab and non-Arab regional states, the central motif of the Middle East crisis was the denial of Palestinian statehood.

In the great world beyond which has traditionally supported the Palestinian right of self-determination, there have been candid expressions of hope that the loss of another 79 lives in this wanton assault would shock Hamas and Fatah into restoring the factional unity without which national liberation struggles tend to disintegrate from within.

There has never been any doubt about the principal motive behind the intensification of Israel's oppression which has taken 400 Palestinian lives in the last six months.

It was to sharpen the Fatah-Hamas contradiction in the hope that the people who gave Hamas 74 seats against Fatah's 45 in a universally acknowledged free election would recoil in unbearable pain from supporting Hamas.

Whatever else be the merits of rival discourses, Esmail Haniya has, in his own words, steadfastly asked his people to come out of the shadow of suffering and strive to change the reality of their condition rather than succumb to it as Israel and its international allies have demanded ever since the fateful days of June 1967.

The reality is ritually defined as acceptance of Israel's annexation of at least 10 per cent of the West Bank on which the colonists have established armed Jewish communities often through confiscation of privately owned Arab lands, re-confirmation of the past agreements which Israel itself never implemented fully, accept the judaisation of East Jerusalem and the final abandonment of the right of return.

Willingness

Since the Palestinian election, Haniya has shown a willingness to move towards an honest two-state solution. It has become increasingly difficult for him to sustain this movement as the United States has overshadowed efforts of the international community to recognise it and factor it into its approach to the core issues in the Middle East.

For the Palestinians the immediate need is the lifting of the siege, the extension of ceasefire to the West Bank and the building up of an internal consensus on what Ehud Olmert describes as "well-defined borders" of a future Palestinian state.

Negotiations with Israel have to create an acceptable, just and sustainable reality, not just provide the modality for legitimising Israel's illegal colonisation.

Allowing the framing of Palestinian politics as Mahmoud Abbas's moderation and Hamas's extremism only frustrates this objective. Khalid Mesha'al's recent visit to Cairo showed that the much demonised Damuscus-based Hamas leadership is not averse to an honourable settlement.

Israel, on the other hand, still seems to think that it can meet the fast changing situation in the region with tactical ploys that promise little substantive reciprocity to Palestinian flexibility.

Ehud Olmert went to Ben Gurion's grave and in a remarkable imitation of the deceptive style of the inventor of Middle East terrorism loaded an offer of a "dialogue", (not substantive negotiations), with Mahmoud Abbas with heavy preconditions.

If the Palestinians, he says, set up a new government that would undertake to fulfil the principles of the Quartet, a government that would realise the Roadmap and bring about the release of Gilad Shalit, he would, then, meet Abbas to start a serious dialogue.

Israel may, as result of this dialogue, evacuate many territories and the colonies established therein. Olmert did not even hint at ending the siege and observing an end to aggressive action in the West Bank. He may be able to deflect the disquiet in the West with his offer but it carries little hope for meaningful, result-oriented negotiations.

A critical study of recent voting in the Security Council underlines the need for vigorous Arab diplomacy in Europe, the Islamic world, India, China and other Asian states to highlight the salience of the Palestinian question.

The aim should be to encourage a more independent European stance, more effective Muslim support and stability of Asian support.

Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.

Friends of Palestine all over the world have heaved a sigh of relief that Hamas and Fatah have decided to establish a government of national unity.

There is renewed hope that a debilitating rivalry discernable between them since Hamas's electoral victory has now ended. If Fatah was reluctant to consider the option of a unity government in the aftermath of the elections, its readiness to participate in it now opens up avenues blocked by internecine tensions.

This welcome decision has not come too soon. Palestine is groaning under diverse burdens. Its people have paid a heavy price for the ill-conceived attempts by external powers to overturn the results of a free election.

Linking continuation of international assistance to three conditions recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and acceptance of past interim peace agreements was clearly a lever to create unbearable humanitarian suffering that, in turn, would unravel Esmail Haniya's administration. Israel added to the pressure by withholding taxes amounting to $54 million collected by it on behalf of the Palestinian National Authority.

The recent strike involving 85,000 teachers and civil servants was clearly an index of the growing economic hardship in the Palestinian society.

There is little doubt that Hamas's resilience in resisting these pressures, and not the June 25 attack by three Palestinian groups, was the real reason for a relentless Israeli onslaught that has already killed 257 Palestinians and wounded another 1,280.

While the world was focused on the carnage in Lebanon, Israel piled up misery on Palestinians by delivering crippling blows to vital installations and facilities.

Insensitivity to Palestinian suffering was rationalised by citing Hamas's failure to accept the three pre-conditions. That it had already sent subtle signals of a calibrated willingness to explore an eventual territorial settlement on the basis of the borders of June 4, 1967 was conveniently forgotten.

Hamas was expected to simply fold up in the face of political isolation, economic punishment and Israel's military pressure. In the Islamic world, there was much concern that unravelling of the democratic process that had brought Hamas into mainstream politics might push the Palestinian society into a vortex of violence.

Consequences of disarray in Palestinian ranks would be particularly grave for the Arab world in the emerging regional situation. The neo-conservative plan for Iraq lies in tatters. The best hope today is to stop the country's slide into a sectarian civil war and a three way split.

Washington has shown no desire to engage Syria in a peace process that would include Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Meanwhile Israel's brutal invasion of Lebanon has produced an outcome that does not make for enduring peace and stability. Its military failure has shaken the very foundations of its invincible armed deterrence.

It is obsessed that organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah are being enabled by Iran and Syria to challenge Israel's right to perpetuate a perennial imbalance of power.

Zionist hawks demand a reassertion of Israeli supremacy as the only guarantee of Israel's security. Unlike the rest of the world, Israel would not see the situation arising out of the Lebanon war as an opportunity for a just and equitable peace but as a reason for restoring its hegemonic status.

Colonisation of Palestine remains the principal objective of this status. Ehud Olmert's convergence plan represented a vital stage in this process which also needed neutralisation of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Olmert plan was designed to achieve territorial expansion and fail-safe national security in a single political manoeuvre. It has now been lost in the dust of a failed military adventure.

The Palestinian people will have to be more vigilant and, indeed, united than ever before to counter the next move by an Israel that has been hurt badly.

It is important to unfreeze the negotiating process and a government of national unity will be better placed to do it. President Mahmoud Abbas has absorbed much outside criticism for not having used greater force to dismantle the power of Hamas.

But clearly his restraint did not come simply from law the provisions of the constitution; it also came in an equal measure from his recognition of Hamas's role in crafting a more effective Arab negotiating stance in the days ahead.

He knows only too well how Israel turned the Oslo agreement into a process for unreciprocated Arab concessions in the quest for final status talks.

A new and robust partnership between Fatah and Hamas demolishes the Israeli myth that there is no credible interlocutor on the Palestinian side. It will also be a necessary hedge against pressures for unilateral Arab concessions.

The Quartet's demand that Hamas endorses the past agreements will be fair if it also acknowledges the lack of symmetry in implementing them.

At the same time, this partnership offers by far the best opportunity for Hamas to separate what can be pragmatically done at this delicate juncture of history and what is better left to another time, another generation.

For now, the only hope for peace is a two-state solution that the Arab states have spelt out with clarity. A sovereign, viable and continuous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital is still the best way to make the world safer than it has been for decades.

Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.

THERE is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the western project of bringing democracy to Arab-Islamic societies. Stripped of rhetoric, democracy is meant to be a procedure to elect representatives and rulers approved in advance by the principal arbiters in centres of global hegemony. A verdict by a Muslim electorate in favour of a political party that anchors its agenda in Islamic values is virtually a casus belli.

The denial of this democratic right was the beginning of a protracted conflict in Algeria. Now Israel insists that Hamas cannot be allowed to participate in the forthcoming Palestinian elections and if Mahmoud Abbas does not eliminate Hamas from the contest, Israel will not allow voting in Jerusalem. Sharon’s spokesman considers a possible Hamas victory as the end of the peace process.

This is a disconcerting and perplexing response to the recent gains made by Hamas in the local body elections. Analysed in the framework of accepted norms applicable to conflict resolution, the transition from armed struggle to a readiness to participate in a political process — the momentous shift from bullets to the ballot — is a desirable transformation that should be encouraged.

This is the matrix of all initiatives by the United Kingdom, Ireland and the international community in the case of Northern Ireland. This is what every Arab-Islamic government would devoutly pray for in the case of Palestine. This is, indeed, what many thoughtful Israeli peace activists would want. But this is the change that Sharon fears most for the obvious reason that it would deprive him of a major excuse for systematically dismantling the peace process painstakingly put together at Madrid and Oslo.

“Historical experience,” writes Yoram Schweitzer of Israel’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies in a recent article “suggests that the entry of terrorist organizations into political processes and parliamentary competition has a moderating effect on their behaviour. In certain circumstances, it has even prompted them to abandon terrorism as the primary mode of action and replace it with political activism.”

This observation would be widely shared but unfortunately it runs counter to Israel’s project of coercing the post-Arafat Palestinian National Authority into accepting a settlement that cedes a large chunk of the West Bank to Greater Israel, abandons all Arab claims on Jerusalem, negates the Palestinian right of return forever and abridges Palestinian sovereignty to municipal powers in some disconnected territories.

Democratization of Arab Palestine is expected to be synonymous with the legitimization of Israel’s expansionism since 1967.

Since Hamas’ entry into the political arena may give heart to Mahmoud Abbas’ resistance to this self-serving interpretation of democracy for Palestinians, it must continue to be demonized as a ‘terrorist organization’.

Opposing the historic manoeuvre by which Hamas seeks to assume a political role alongside Fateh and other Palestinian factions, albeit without giving up the right of armed resistance to the 38-year-old occupation, demonstrates more than anything else how deep-seated is the fear of peace in some of the most powerful echelons of Israel’s establishment. Evidently, this opposition at this point of time is a tactic that reduces the options available to Mahmoud Abbas and perhaps forces him to postpone the elections scheduled for January 2006.

Israel’s own political spectrum extends from enlightened left-liberals of the Labour party to rightist extremists whose irrationality and racism match the political ideology of Hitler’s Nazism. This spread of opinion and policy is cited as proof of the democratic temper of the Jewish state but the same state arrogates to itself the right to prescribe to the Palestinians the limits of their politics.

HAMAS — Harkat al Muqawwama al-Islamiyya — is a child of the Palestinian intifada. It was born out of a painful realization that the broader secular Palestinian struggle for freedom needed to be reinvigorated, and if need be supplanted by, a movement drawing upon Islam’s historical conflict with injustice. Its roots are to be found in the growing apprehension that PLO’s decision to embark upon the uncharted peace process had been cynically exploited by Israel to intensify land appropriations, settlement activity in the West Bank and Jewish colonization of East Jerusalem. Nor had the peace process curbed the Israeli extremist view that ultimately the Palestinian question would have to be solved by the mass expulsion of Arabs from Eretz Israel.

Faced by the threat of annihilation, a segment of the Palestinian activists turned to the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood for inspiration and concluded that they must build an enduring capacity to counter the incremental depredation of Israel. Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon and a clear demonstration that the only effective resistance to it came from the much maligned ‘warriors of Islam’ added a new dimension to the Arab struggle for survival. This development is reminiscent of similar stages in the emergence of the French resistance, the Yugoslav partisans who took on the might of the third Reich, the IRA and countless liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Its essence is clear enough: the martyr embraces death so that his people can live.

In its formative years, Hamas talked of supplementing Yasser Arafat not challenging him, of deepening the intifada by enabling the people to absorb the Israeli reprisals and of creating a multi-tiered long- term resistance in collaboration with the PLO cadres.

Gradually, Hamas designed itself as an alternative to the PLO with its own distinctive political, intelligence-gathering and military wings. Its point of departure from the PLO was two-fold. First, PLO was a national platform that united Muslim and Christians in a joint secular liberation movement. Hamas reflected the view that this unity should not obliterate the Islamic identity of the Muslim component of the nation.

Secondly, even as the majority of Palestinians followed Yasser Arafat in exploring all available avenues of negotiating a settlement with Israel under the US-driven peace process, there was a strong body of opinion that Israel would never offer honourable terms for it.

A Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Quqa defined intifada as going beyond the “circles of politics, or raising (of) and discussing (the) issue in conferences and organizations” and aiming at “liberating the land, and the honour and creed” — a comprehensive and extensive liberation of Palestine from imperialist oppressors, as he put it. It was, as the memorable writings of late Edward Said showed, by no means a mere Islamist or Jihadist view of the Palestinian dilemma.

Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon and Israel’s subsequent determination to virtually annex a sizable part of southern Lebanon has never been fully discussed in our own midst. In fact, I recall a number of occasions when Arab intellectuals and diplomats showed me copies of a strangely composed tribute to Sahabzada Yaqub Khan by the internationally known American columnist, Safire, in which this distinguished writer strained an observation made by the Pakistani foreign minister to him to imply that he advocated a continuous American military presence in Lebanon. This was clearly a motivated construction put on what he had said to Safire but it underscored the role that Lebanon was expected to play in the destruction of the Palestinian liberation struggle. That Israel was to hold on to this strategic enclave till the Hezbollah made it materially untenable lent credence to the view that resistance to Israel could not be exclusively political.

In its early years, the relative emphasis by Hamas on community values and welfare projects made it relatively more acceptable to Israel than the militant wings of the PLO. In Islamic Politics in Palestine, Beverley Milton-Edwards has documented Israel’s hope that Hamas, as a reformist, welfare-oriented movement would actually dilute Yasser Arafat’s hold on Palestinian politics. There are several milestones marking the ascendancy of the Izzul Din al-Qassam brigade in the Hamas hierarchy but perhaps no more dramatic than the massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron by an Israeli settler on the fateful February morning 1994.

There is an inherent banality in such random acts of violence but in the context of the Sharon-authored colonization of the West Bank, it dramatizes a fear of extermination. Earlier, in December 1992, Israel had rounded up more than 400 Hamas activists and left them stranded and derelict in Marj al-Zahour in occupied southern Lebanon.

Unlike some other militant factions such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas has shown an awareness of present day regional and global realities by its willingness to terminate its boycott of political institutions under conditions of alien occupation. It regards abandonment of armed struggle as premature, but implicit in its bid for a share of political power is the promise of accepting Israel’s right to exist within its pre-1967 borders.

Political participation will change the semantics of intra-Palestinian rivalries and set the stage for productive negotiations between the two nations for a genuine two-state solution provided Israel throws up a leadership that accepts peaceful co-existence within secure frontiers as its principal objective. Security in the Middle East is not divisible and Israel will never find it without according it to the other party.

For the Arabs, it has been a long retreat since 1949 but there is no space left for its further extension. Doubtless, Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas know this reality. The Palestinian voter is making it manifestly clear that it now leans towards those who rule out anything less than a viable nation state of their own with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.