With Hamas Takeover, Tough Calls for Israel

"The only way Abbas can be rescued is by getting a political process started with Israel," said Walid Salem of the Panorama center, a Palestinian institute in Jerusalem that promotes democracy. "Otherwise, what happened in Gaza will happen in the West Bank within two years."

But former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who heads the opposition Likud Party, and other politicians have redoubled their arguments that the idea of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank is over.

Netanyahu has revived a proposal calling for Jordan, most of whose residents are of Palestinian descent, and the West Bank to enter into a "confederation" that would bind them together economically, politically and on security matters. Such an arrangement would presumably leave much of the West Bank, at least that portion Israel has effectively annexed with its separation barrier, under Israeli control.

Under that proposal, Egypt would assume responsibility for Gaza, which it held before the 1967 Middle East war. But Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic political movement that is President Hosni Mubarak's chief opposition.

The summit attended by Olmert, Abbas, Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, this week was designed, in part, to head off those proposals by advocating the start of comprehensive peace talks based on a 2002 Arab League proposal.

The plan would grant Israel recognition across the Arab world in exchange for a full withdrawal from all territory taken in the 1967 war. It also calls for a "just" solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.

Olmert called the plan "important." But his domestic political standing is weak, and beginning negotiations could alienate the hawks in his coalition government.

A decade before Oslo, the Israeli military government in the territories embraced an unarmed and fledgling Islamic movement, licensing Islamic schools, sports clubs, charities and the university that would become the training ground for Hamas's political leadership.

The idea was to create an Islamic political counterweight to Yasser Arafat's Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization, the group Israel feared most until Hamas declared itself in armed opposition to the Jewish state as the first Palestinian uprising erupted in 1987.

Now Abbas has begun revoking the licenses of those Hamas charities and cutting off their flow of outside funds.

"This is an irony of history," said Yossi Alpher, a former officer in Israel's foreign intelligence service, Mossad, who edits the Web site Bitterlemons.org. "But I believe an Islamic political movement would have emerged in Palestine, and it would have been armed, whether Israel encouraged it or not."

Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University, said Israel's "policy moves over the years have been consistently rational in the decision-making stage and utterly irrational in terms of understanding the consequences."