Enemies of Peace

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas needs help against Hamas.

THE ERUPTION of factional fighting in the Gaza Strip, which yesterday killed at least six more Palestinians, was sadly predictable. Each time Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has attempted to break the impasse between his moderate Fatah party and the Islamic Hamas movement -- the essential precondition for a resumption of the Middle East peace process -- extremists backed by Syria and Iran have intervened to block any progress. On Saturday Mr. Abbas proposed that new elections be held for both his post and for the Hamas-controlled Palestinian legislature; armed attacks, including one on his own compound, began the next day.

The politicians and pundits outside the Middle East who have been insisting on the need for a Middle East settlement, including the Iraq Study Group, tend to describe the obstacle as passivity by the Bush administration or obstructionism by Israel. Mr. Abbas knows better. In calling for elections, a desperate and risky measure with uncertain legal justification, the moderate president delivered a speech describing how Hamas and its sponsors had paralyzed Palestinian government and made peace talks impossible. "They give orders from afar, and reject offers from afar," he said. He was referring to Hamas hard-liner Khaled Meshal, who from a base in Damascus has blocked political agreements between his movement and Mr. Abbas's Fatah party, and who has prevented the release of a captured Israeli soldier, even in exchange for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. There is also Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, who flew to Tehran this month to accept tens of millions of dollars from the Iranian regime -- and to announce that Hamas would never compromise with Israel.

Now Hamas is using armed force in an attempt to prevent an election. Its aim is not so much to stop a change of government -- it never wanted to govern Gaza -- as to block accord with Israel. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made clear in a speech last month, a Palestinian government ready to recognize Israel and accept a two-state solution could advance rapidly toward that goal. Israel has abandoned its attempt to impose a solution unilaterally; its government, like the Bush administration, is newly eager to negotiate.

For the process to start, Hamas's extreme leaders and their foreign sponsors have to be defeated or sidelined. A Palestinian civil war, like that which now threatens, is unlikely to achieve that end; more probable is that it would turn Gaza into another Baghdad, to the benefit of the extremists. Bargaining by Israel or the West with Syria or Iran is conceivable, but it is unlikely to be fruitful as long as the militants and their sponsors pay no price for their aggression. In Gaza, as in Lebanon, the moderates favored by the West need help that goes beyond offers to "engage" their enemies. For example, Mr. Olmert has been talking about holding talks with Mr. Abbas and trying to strike incremental agreements that Hamas could not block; the Bush administration has been talking about arming and training Mr. Abbas's presidential guard forces. Now would be a good time to accelerate such actions.