THIS WEEK’S election in Israel was unusual. It’s rare for politics in that country to be based on policy rather than personality. But when voters went to the polls on Tuesday, their choice was between continuing the painful occupation of territories in the West Bank or a future separation from the Palestinians.

With his victory, the Kadima leader Ehud Olmert will now put together a coalition committed to withdrawing unilaterally from substantial areas of the West Bank. This policy will have a profound effect on the region and the world — and could bring Israelis a new sense of psychological and physical security. Hamas, now running the Palestinian Authority, seems unlikely to launch an intifada of suicide bombers while Israel is deploying troops to remove Jewish settlers.

That’s the good news. But there are dangers lurking. For there is a key difference between Mr Olmert’s plan to remove settlements on the West Bank and the withdrawal ordered by Ariel Sharon, his predecessor, from Gaza last summer. Gaza was relatively clean and quick. The West Bank could be far more complicated.

Last time round, the Israeli Prime Minister was dealing with a Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. Mr Sharon made sure that Fatah was kept informed of the details of his plans, though both sides knew it was not in their interest to broadcast the fact. It wasn’t really a negotiation, but at least the Palestinians knew what was going to happen on the ground and when. As a result, Israeli troops were able to remove Jewish settlers without the added threat of Palestinian attack.

The Israelis will not offer the same access and information to Hamas, an organisation that has sent numerous suicide bombers to kill innocent Israeli men, women and children and that still refuses to recognise Israel’s right even to exist. This time there could be chaos. So lines of communications will need to be kept open. Quietly, a broker — perhaps the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, or an international figure — will need to be found to pass messages between the two sides.

The second problem is that the next phases of withdrawal will undoubtedly involve a huge security operation and sealed borders, and this could mean further hardships for the Palestinians. Today there are already shortages of food and medicine in the occupied territories; with stepped-up security we may witness a genuine humanitarian crisis.

This could involve a tragic human cost — and there will be a political price as well. The Israelis already face a huge battle for public opinion. If television pictures of desperate, starving children are beamed around the world, as they were during the years of sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the international condemnation of Israel will be swift and severe, even though the Jewish settlements are being removed.

Inasmuch as the world is already hugely sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people as a result of occupation, Mr Olmert would be well advised to help to organise a large-scale relief operation. If he will not deal directly with Hamas, and surely he will not, the international community needs to help him to construct an arm’s-length programme to provide food, medicine and shelter for the Palestinians. It may fall to non-governmental organisations or the United Nations to put in place a support network that saves lives — and Israel’s reputation.

Israel will want guarantees that international aid does not visibly strengthen Hamas or free resources for its militias. A mechanism will be needed to ensure that Hamas is not able to smuggle in guns and bombs under the guise of aid. At a minimum, aid should be provided in the form of goods and services rather than as money directly to the Palestinian Authority. Cash has a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of the wrong people. The details will be crucial.

Meanwhile, expectations need to be lowered: there will be no handshakes on the White House lawn, talks at Camp David or shuttle diplomacy. The peace process, for so long the subject of so much attention, is gone. The best we can hope for is that negotiations will be replaced not by unilateralism but by a form of parallelism. For while the Israelis are choosing to pull up stakes and establish new borders, Hamas may forsake terrorism for a while so that it can focus on improving the lives of ordinary Palestinians and show that it can run a functioning government with a minimum of corruption. It may put forward a reasonable face of moderation to the world, a face of restraint, at least temporarily.

But even when Hamas sounds reasonable and says that it can accept an Israel within its pre-1967 borders, it does not speak of achieving lasting peace with its enemy but of a “truce”. This is not the “war is over” language of President Sadat of Egypt in 1979 or of King Hussein of Jordan in 1994.

And that’s the real dilemma. For so long as Hamas continues to use these deceptive formulations, the Palestinians are not going to achieve their goal of a viable state of their own. That is why the international community should not waste its energies on seeking a permanent peace. Instead it should work to promote parallel restraint.

James P. Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, now anchors World News Tonight on Sky News

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