RAFIQ HUSSEINI wore a tank top. As we chatted last week over dinner, the chief of staff to Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, talked gently, sympathetically, about the problems of peace. He was clear about the Palestinian case, but also disarmingly self-critical. He acknowledged the corruption that had characterised the authority and he forthrightly condemned the strategy of launching rocket attacks against Israel, pointing out that the rockets often fell short and killed Palestinians. He talked with affection of his years in England and his studies at City University. It was hard not to like him.

It was all very different to my last visit to Israel. Then I met Yassir Arafat in his Ramallah compound. Battledress, headscarves and guns were far more prevalent than tank tops; sycophancy and self-pity were far more prevalent than self-criticism. It was a nervous, dispiriting occasion.

Yet there is a bitter irony in the contrasting nature of these encounters.The Arafat meeting took place in the early summer of 2000, at arguably the most hopeful moment in 50 years of Middle East diplomacy. Ariel Sharon unfurled a map for us and outlined the territorial deal that he felt the Palestinians might accept. The British Ambassador, despite years of Foreign Office training, sounded optimistic. An Israeli journalist friend told me that he was thinking of taking a job in public relations since “the story here will soon be over”.

How wrong he was. By the time, almost six years later, that I met Mr Husseini, the situation had become infinitely depressing. For all the urbanity of the dinner conversation with this Palestinian leader, my friend is still penning articles about death and violence.

When Mahmoud Abbas took office after Arafat’s death, there were those who emphasised his hardline past and his extraordinary efforts at Holocaust denial (a PhD thesis and a book attemting to refute “the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed”). Others, impressed by his modest demeanour and that of people like Mr Husseini, were more sanguine. The sad truth now is that we may never get to find out who was right. The explanation for the gap between our dinner conversation and the situation on the ground is that the moderates, if that is what they are, have lost what control they had. After just one year in office, and having vowed not to run again, Mr Abbas looks increasingly like a lame duck.

The debates over who should represent the Fatah party in last week’s elections rather make the point. Mr Abbas was required to concede the top place on the list to the leader of the radical Fatah rebels, Marwan Barghouti, currently serving multiple life sentences for his role in a number of murders. The rebels are gradually taking control of Fatah.

At the same time, as the chaos in Gaza indicates, the attempt of the Palestinian Authority to bring the use of guns under its own control is failing miserably. The best hope for peace offered by the diverse Fatah factions may be that they are too busy shooting at each other and arguing over who stole what from whom, to wage an effective campaign against anyone else.

All this offers a clue about how to greet the results of the Palestinian elections. For Fatah, believe it or not, are the reasonable tendency. Now Mr Abbas must contend also with the triumph of Hamas, a group that wants, as The Observer’s Will Hutton quaintly put it, “Israel to retreat to pre-1948 borders”, and thinks that your local Rotary club is a Zionist entity that is behind the drugs trade.

The electoral victory of Hamas may not, however, be as great a disaster as it seems. My reason for arguing this is not quite the same as the one I have seen cited by many commentators over the past few days. These writers share the view put to me last week not just by Mr Husseini, but also by Israeli defence sources and senior politicians, that the responsibilities of its electoral mandate might gradually turn Hamas from terrorist movement into a peaceful political party, perhaps splitting it along the way. The examples were offered of the co-option of the Islamists in Turkey and the dividing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Everyone mentioned Ireland.

Yet these changes did not happen by magic. They were not a natural evolution. They were the result of a conscious, strong-minded, campaign to defeat terrorism. Only decades of exclusion split the Muslim Brotherhood. In Ireland, the IRA began to shift only with the gradual realisation of Gerry Adams that his terror campaign would lose and that the fruits of political involvement would be witheld until he had decided to abandon the bullet for the ballot.

And this may be the silver lining behind Hamas’s victory. While Hamas remained outside the political process altogether and Mr Abbas was the public face of the Palestinians, it was possible to pretend that there could be peace, some sort of negotiated settlement, without first defeating terrorism. The idea was that a land deal would bring an end to violence.

This is, and always has been, an illusion. The truth is the exact opposite — an end to violence will bring a land deal. Israel will have to make painful concessions and give away territory it wants to keep. Apart from anything else demographics has persuaded even the Israeli Right that the Jewish state cannot simply incorporate the occupied territories. It is impossible, now, to imagine Israel wishing to hold on for long to occupied land if the people living there do not pose a threat.

With the ascent of Hamas to office, at last the funders of the Palestinian Authority and the diplomatic community may see that the quickest route to peace lies in confronting terrorism, rather than appeasing it. Everything else has failed. It’s all we have left.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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