Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority legislative
elections has everyone asking "what next"? The answer, and
whether the result should be seen as a good or bad thing,
depends very much on who is asking the question.

Although a Hamas success was heavily trailed, the scale of
the victory has been widely termed a "shock." Several
factors explain the dramatic rise of Hamas, including
disillusionment and disgust with the corruption, cynicism
and lack of strategy of the Fatah faction which has
dominated the Palestinian movement for decades and had
arrogantly come to view itself as the natural and
indisputable leader.

The election result is not entirely surprising, however,
and has been foreshadowed by recent events. Take for
example the city of Qalqilya in the north of the West
Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and now completely
surrounded by a concrete wall, the city's fifty thousand
residents are prisoners of a giant Israeli-controlled
ghetto. For years Qalqilya was controlled by Fatah but
after the completion of the wall, voters in last years'
municipal elections awarded every single city council seat
to Hamas. The Qalqilya effect has now spread across the
occcupied territories, with Hamas reportedly winning
virtually all of the seats elected on a geographic basis.
Thus Hamas' success is as much an expression of the
determination of Palestinians to resist Israel's efforts
to force their surrender as it is a rejection of Fatah. It
reduces the conflict to its most fundamental elements:
there is occupation, and there is resistance.

For Palestinians under occupation, it is not yet clear
what Hamas' win will mean. It is now common to speak of a
Palestinian "government" being formed out of the election
results, as though Palestine were already a sovereign and
independent state. But if the first duty of a government
is to protect its people's lives, liberty and property,
then the Palestinian Authority has never deserved to be
called a government. Since its inception, it has not been
able to protect Palestinians from lethal daily attacks by
the Israeli army in the heart of their towns and refugee
camps, or to prevent a single dunum of land being seized
for settlements, nor to save a single sapling of the more
than one million trees uprooted by Israel in the past ten
years. Rather, the Palestinian Authority was supposed to
crush Palestinian resistance to make the occupied
territories safe for continued Israeli colonization. Hamas
will certainly not allow that to continue, but whether it
will be able to tranform the Authority into an arm of the
struggle against Israel is by no means certain. Hamas,
which has observed a unilateral truce with Israel for a
year, has signalled that it wants to continue this if
Israel "reciprocates." The movement clearly believes it
can make such an offer from a position of strength and it
is to its tactical advantage to leave uncertainty about
when and how it might resume full-scale armed resistance.

Elements of the Palestinian Authority security services
controlled by Fatah figures may be unwilling to put
themselves under the control of a Hamas-led authority,
which could lead to the collapse of what is left of the
Authority's structure, or even its break-up into personal
militias. Israel, and the United States which refuses to
accept the outcome of the election may see an interest in
encouraging such an internal conflict. Israel is likely to
use Hamas' win as a further pretext to tighten repression
and accelerate its unilateral imposition of walls and
settlements on the West Bank designed to annex the maximum
number of land with the minimum not of Palestinians. Such
developments increase the risks of a dramatic escalation
of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

As for the majority of Palestinians, who live as refugees
and exiles in the diaspora, they have been progressively
excluded and marginalized from efforts to solve the
conflict. Whereas the US and its allies, with UN
assistance, went to extraordinary lengths to allow Iraqi
"out of country voters" to participate in that country's
elections, the same powers have shown no interest in
giving Palestinian refugees a voice. Fatah, which many
Palestinian refugees suspect would sell out their rights
in a peace deal with Israel, obviously had no incentive to
demand such participation. It remains to be seen if Hamas,
born in Gaza where ninety percent of the population are
refugees, will be able to articulate an agenda that speaks
to the concerns of the diaspora.

For the "international community" -- principally the
'Quartet' made up of the United States, the European
Union, Russia and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the
election result is a major embarassment. They, and the
coterie of well-funded NGOs and think tanks that generate
so much of their intellectual guff have built their
approach on the notion that Palestinian "reform" rather
than an end to the Israeli occupation, is the way to
resolve the conflict. While nominally committing
themselves to a two-state solution, these powers dragged
the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority into an endless game
where Palestinians have to jump through hoops to prove
their worthiness of basic rights, while at the same time
no pressure has been applied to Israel to end the
confiscation of land and expansion of settlements. This
peace process industry chose to hail Israel's tactical
withdrawal of eight thousand settlers from Gaza last
summer, while ignoring the far larger number of settlers
Israel has continued to plant all over the West Bank
effectively rendering a two-state solution unachievable.

The principal purpose of this game is not to bring about a
just and lasting peace but merely to inoculate the players
from the charge that they were doing nothing to resolve a
conflict that remains an enduring focus of regional and
worldwide concern. A true peace effort would require
confronting Israel and holding it accountable, something
none of the Quartet members have the political will to do.
There is no doubt that Fatah was entirely complicit in the
game, to which it had become both a prisoner and an
indispensable partner. Why else would the United States
have desperately tried to shore Fatah up by spending
millions of dollars on projects in recent months designed
to buy votes, and why else would the EU have threatened to
cut off aid if Palestinians voted for Hamas? Most
Palestinians could see clearly that after years of
negotiations and billions of dollars of foreign aid they
are poorer and less free than ever before as more of their
land has been seized. It is no wonder that this kind of
bribery and blackmail had no power over them and probably
had the opposite effect, increasing Hamas support.

Hamas' victory pulls the rug from under the project of
trying to deflect the blame for the conflict from Israeli
colonization to Palestinian internal pathologies. The
peace process industry will not give up easily, however,
and will now urge Hamas to act "responsibly" and to
"moderate" its positions -- which means in effect
abandoning all forms of resistance and assuming the docile
and complicit role hitherto played by Fatah.

The instant US demand that Hamas "recognize Israel" is
like rewinding the clock twenty-five years to when this
same demand was the pretext to ignore and exclude the PLO
from peace negotiations. But as Hamas has observed, all
the PLO's submission to these demands did not lead to any
loosening of Israel's grip or any lessening of US support
for Israel. Hamas is unlikely to do as the US demands, and
even if it did, it would probably only give rise to new
resistance groups responding to the worsening conditions
on the ground generated by the occupation.

Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada