StrategicAssessment Volume9,No.1,April2006
1
Hamas's Victory and Israel's Dilemma
Mark A. Heller
Dilemma: a situation necessitating a choice between two alternatives that are equally
unfavorable.
The instinctive reaction to the unexpected victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative
Council (PLC) elections – at least among most foreign observers – was to ask what this
outcome means for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But for Israel, that is almost
certainly the least relevant of the many questions raised by Hamas's political
breakthrough. Rather than speculating about a peace process in which it is no longer
invested, Israel will instead focus on dealing with the dilemma that Hamas's victory
ostensibly poses: either accepting (and thereby encouraging the region and the world to
accept) an unreformed Hamas as a legitimate interlocutor or resorting to means that may
undermine its own regional and international legitimacy.
Even before the PLC elections, the peace process existed as little more than a
legal fiction. Although it was never formally buried and neither side had explicitly
renounced any of its documentary milestones – the Declaration of Principles and follow-
up agreements (Oslo) or the Quartet-sponsored roadmap – it had effectively been in a
state of suspended animation, at least since the end of negotiations at Taba in early 2001.
Thus, the prevailing assumption in Israel before the election results became known was
that there was no realistic possibility of reviving the peace process in the foreseeable
future. It therefore makes little practical difference that Fatah lost the elections, because
even if it won, it would have had neither the will nor the authority to go beyond whatever
concessions it had already agreed to in the past. In fact, it would probably have been even
more constrained by a strengthened Hamas participating fully in Palestinian political
institutions – which was the post-election scenario that most analysts did predict. In other
words, no real peace process existed before the elections and none was expected to
emerge after the elections; the projected post-election agenda would focus not on
Director of Research at JCSS
