Advantage: Hamas?

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions a little bit--hence the question mark--but it seems that Hamas has forced Israel to the negotiating table. Not just with the prisoner swap, but by embarrassing Olmert and this whole nonsense of unilateral disengagement.

A couple of weeks ago Hamas was a terrorist organization and Israel would not deign to acknowledge it as the elected Palestinian government. And more interesting of all is that Hamas gained this status with violence, but not with terrorism.

Look at what they did, they killed two soldiers, and kidnapped another. Now, that's hardly an act of terrorism. Look at Israel's response now, which called 40 Palestinians, including children, destroyed millions of dollars in civilian installations and is now back to the terms Hamas initially dictated, a prisoner swap.

I've always agreed with Tony Judt that Hamas, like the IRA and to a degree ETA, will eventually reform and become more moderate, I think we've seen that started to happen. (You should definitely check out Tony Judt's essay A Road to Nowhere, which four years later, is still the defining treatise on modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

In the end, there's just no asphyxiating Hamas into irrelevance. And the past few weeks have shown that.