In any case, I also happen agree that this is good news. Perhaps this moves the region just a bit closer to shitting or getting off its collective pot. Hamas has to figure out how to keep water running and streets clean. And delivering these things means dealing with the reality of the Jewish state, instead of preaching irredentist fantasies on the sidelines.

Also, I wonder — when is the wall scheduled to be finished? And when does the Israeli right (and its US allies) begin the push to get the Bush Administration to tacitly agree to accept Israeli annexation of all territory outside the wall?

Now they have to come out into the open and govern. They can’t just hide and blame everything on the Jews and the occupation. Its like the Romulans being forced to decloak.

The fun part of this whole sorry situation is going to be watching the “give peace a chance” crowd try to parse statements like “we want all the Jews in the middle east dead” for signs that the Palistinians want a two state solution. Arafat and his heirs were always clever in playing on the naivete of the west with their peace talk in English while calling for war in Arabic. it is going to be quite a site watching them turn handstands saying “while it is true that the Palistinian government is calling for the extermination of the Jews in Israel we still think that if Israel would just stop construction of the security fence everything would turn around.” or ” look at the free breakfast programs Hamas has created, this shows it is the Jews fault that these kind gents want to finish what Hitler started.”

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,397493,00.html

…Some Hamas leaders are already signalling that rather than running the government on their own, they would prefer to create a national unity government that would include representatives of all Palestinian parties. Otherwise, it would prefer to govern together with the Fatah Party….

The bright side is, the black turbans and the Magic Kingdom fund them and more money for that, less for other adventures and their people.

Everything I know about Hamas suggests it is a direct decendent of the muslim brotherhood–devout (no pun intended) terrorists and jihadists who gave OBL, Zahawiri and the like. I think it will also be very interesting to see if they turn into a taliban, imposing sharia and strict Islam–recall the taliban was welcomed for a while as an order-bring group into the warlordism of Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat there.

I do think there is a fundamental difference, however–the Pals are much more secular and I while they have their little foibles such as honor killings and tribalism, I suspect attempts to enforce strict Islam will backfire big time. During my stay in Saudia Arabia, the ex-patriot pals who worked there were regarded with great suspicion by the Saudis as not being very good moslems and troublemakers to boot.

We do live in interesting times.

I think this (vide sup what Knuck said) is more or less no-lose for Israel and the USA. Either Hamas has to grow up and act like a government, in which case Israel can treat them like a hostile foreign power, or the Palistinian areas will collapse into civil war and we’ll see the same thing that happened in the Palestinian areas in Jordan.

Hamas, without political power, had no need to worry about appearances. My biggest concern now is that I they will walk in their predecessors steps and do just the same…feign moderation (while helping others do the killing without their fingerprints on it). Old Europe and the Left will swallow it whole, and cry “please, may I have some more!” Making it harder for Israel to hold the Islanimals accountable, as usual.