Tom Explains It All (The Hidden Friedman)

Well, at least in terms of the mood of Israel and Palestine in his Wednesday column, The Weapon of Democracy (full column available to Times Select subscribers):

The new Hamas parliamentarians will be sworn in on Saturday, and nobody knows what will happen next. Fourteen of the new Palestinian lawmakers are in Israeli jails, including 10 from Hamas. That's more than 10 percent of the whole Parliament.

About the only thing that is clear to me is the radical mood of both Israeli and Palestinian voters. Consider this: Israel is holding its national election on March 28, and the rightist Likud party, led by Bibi Netanyahu, opened its campaign with ads accusing the centrist Kadima Party, led by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, of planning to pull Israel back to the 1967 borders. The Likud quickly backed off that line, however, when it realized that so many Israeli voters today liked the idea of pulling back to near the 1967 borders that some may have thought the ad was taken out by Kadima — instead of being an attack on Kadima by Likud.

Yossi Beilin, who heads the leftist Meretz Party, opened his campaign with an ad that says: "Beilin Will Divide Jerusalem." Again, if you'd seen that ad a decade ago, you'd have thought it was a wicked libel. Today it's a campaign promise! After the failed peace process and the Hamas suicide-bombing campaign, many Israelis just want total separation from Palestinians — and a barrier.

"Ideologically, Israelis have never been more dovish," said Ari Shavit, an essayist for the Haaretz newspaper. "But that dovishness is based on the condition that there is a partner we can trust. If so, people are ready to give back everything. The overwhelming majority is now for a two-state solution. But we have become sensible at the very moment that Palestinians have lost their senses."

The Palestinians have thrown out Yasir Arafat's old Fatah Party in favor of Hamas, which wants to eliminate Israel and erect an Islamic state in all of Palestine. So just when Israel's majority comes around to two states, Mr. Shavit added, the Palestinians elect a party that favors only one.

Or have they? It's obvious that the ruling Fatah Party and its allies, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ran an incomprehensibly stupid campaign. There was no discipline, so in many districts Fatah and its secular-nationalist allies ran four candidates, while Hamas always ran only one. So Fatah votes got divided, and Hamas ones didn't.

The result, the pollster Khalil Shikaki said, is that "Hamas won only 44 percent of the popular vote, but got 56 percent of the seats. Fatah and its allies won 56 percent of the popular vote, but only 43 percent of the seats."

Hamas was clearly elected to provide clean government and order. But it was also elected because its suicide campaign was seen as decisive in getting Israel out of Gaza, thereby bringing Palestinians a measure of dignity, which Fatah failed to do.

[...]

The sense I got from Hamas officials here is that Hamas will be low-key and patient, trying to rule as long as possible without money from abroad, working on improving Palestinian governance and hoping that Palestinian society will remain steadfast — and that the Arab world and Europe will somehow intervene to keep Israel and the U.S. from depriving Hamas of its legitimate mandate.

As Farhat Assad, the local Hamas spokesman, remarked: "I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."

We'll see about that.