This started out as a comment over on the M.J. Rosenberg thread at TPM Cafe. But one idea followed another, and it actually jelled into something I wanted to post here. So here it is.
The talk coming out of Gaza today looks like the leaders of Hamas have gotten what they were fighting for there, then suddenly realized that there is going to be another dawn after the day of victory and the portents for that new day do not look good. When you have spent a long time digging holes to live in and occasionally poking your head up to shoot, and suddenly the shooting stops, there is very suddenly a new and broader perspective than was possible while the bullets flew.
I would suspect that Hamas in Gaza has been fighting mostly as individual cells or small units without much central leadership. The centralizing functions that have been performed have been either support to civilians or providing weapons and food to the fighters. There may be some strategists at work in Gaza Hamas, but their effects have been limited recently. Day to day fighting and survival were the top priorities.
Now, suddenly, the fighters are getting the chance to lift their heads out of the foxholes and look around them. The shooting has stopped, but what they see is not very pretty. Just feeding the million-and-a-half population of Gaza is extremely uncertain, and to do that they are going to have to depend on the kindness of some of the very people they were shooting at yesterday.
I don't think that it is much of a positive statement about Hamas that at the last second when disaster looms they try to stand up and yell "King's X". The Grant of Amnesty to Fatah Leaders (none of whom are in Gaza anymore) is good PR, little else. So is the call for Alan Johnston's release. I'm not sure that even meets the absolute minimum to be expected from the newly empowered Hamas-in-Gaza.
That said, this is a good time to try to get them to the table while preventing a disaster that every Muslim nation in the world would consider genocide. Starving the Palestinians in Gaze is simply not a rational strategy.
But the take-over of Gaza by Hamas is a signal to all sides that the time for talking has arrived. Any idiot (*cough* Cheney - Neocons - extremist and Likud Jews *cough*) who show up with guns and threats at this time clearly don't want any solution at all.
Hamas has won what is clearly a Pyrrhic victory. They will really win only by the grace of their enemies. But the right-wingers (American and Israeli) have been badly embarrassed, and to recover their sense of "face" they are going to refuse to acknowledge the Hamas victory and attempt to step on the throat of the Hamas Palestinians and force them to acknowledge how wrong they are. That would be a stupid move, but certainly the kind of logic that heney and the NeoCons used to get America to invade Iraq. [Their logic - Always use force to gain compliance. Talk doesn't work. Which is true for mouth-breathers whose idea of talk is "Do this or I'll slug you." Read Krauthammer and William Kristol.]
Making something positive out of this change in the Israeli - Palestinian conflict will require that Hamas be brought in to the table of the powerful and melded with Fatah to provide a negotiating partner, while keeping the American and Israeli right-wing idiots from salving their wounded pride. Any Israeli who begins to thread this needle successfully better watch his back - literally. Unfortunately, there is no American in a position of power who is capable of contributing to the solution, especially with Cheney and the NeoCons still very active and conducting the kinds of bureaucratic terrorism that John Bolton is famous for. Even without those impediments, Condi Rice simply isn't capable of contributing. [Maybe if she were bribed with shoes? Naw, she's still not up to it. No matter how she is motivated, the capability is not there.]
In any case, this is a real potential turning point. It could get somewhere. But the enemies of success don't like that, and the window won't remain open more than about one Friedman Unit.
That's my opinion from here in the sticks of Texas, anyway.
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