Hamas win may affect Israeli election

ISRAELI officials convened emergency meetings yesterday to decide how to respond to the militant Hamas group’s upset victory in Palestinian elections, maintaining an outward silence while privately blaming each other for the upheaval.

Hamas’s stunning showing in Wednesday’s vote could send tremors through Israel’s own political establishment ahead of March elections by bolstering hawks who oppose territorial concessions to the Palestinians.

Israeli officials declined to comment, but senior security officials gathered yesterday to discuss the results and acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert held talks with senior officials.

Mr Olmert said on Wednesday, before Hamas claimed victory, that Israel cannot trust a Palestinian leadership in which the Islamic group has a role.

“Israel can’t accept a situation in which Hamas, in its present form as a terror group calling for the destruction of Israel, will be part of the Palestinian Authority without disarming,” Mr Olmert said.

Before the vote, Israel had assumed Hamas would at best be a junior partner in the government, and formulated no public position on how to deal with it.

The militants’ surprisingly strong showing threw officials scrambling into action.

Middle East peace accords of the 1990s stipulated that no terror group could participate in Palestinian elections, but Israel was unable to drum up international support for barring the group from contesting the democratic vote.

Yuval Steinitz of the hardline Likud Party said that’s where Israel went wrong.

“This is a tragic failure in the war against Hamas,” Mr Steinitz told Israel Radio.

“We alone let elections take place with the participation of a terror group that calls for our destruction.”

Former Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Army Radio: “After Hamas is elected, can the world not talk to them? The world will speak to them saying that they were elected in a democratic process ... I think if we had prevented them from participating in the elections, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Lawmaker Ephraim Sneh of the dovish Labor Party said Israel was in part to blame for Hamas’s victory by not making concessions to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that would have boosted his standing in the Palestinian public.

Political analyst Hanan Crystal said Hamas’s election win would be the main issue in Israel’s March elections, predicting it could hurt centre-left parties and benefit the hawkish Likud, which opposed Israel’s summer withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Most likely to suffer is Kadima, the centrist party Ariel Sharon formed in November to seek more leeway in setting Israel’s final borders. Kadima maintained a strong lead in pre-election polls, even after Mr Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke.

Likud’s leader, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that Hamas’s dramatic election victory would turn the Palestinian Authority into a radical, Islamic regime.

“We can’t reach understandings with Hamas because their goal is to destroy Israel,” he said.