Strategic Assessment

The instinctive reaction to the unexpected victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections – at least among most foreign observers – was to ask what this outcome means for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But for Israel, that is almost certainly the least relevant of the many questions raised by Hamas’s political breakthrough. Rather than speculating about a peace process in which it is no longer invested, Israel will instead focus on dealing with the dilemma that Hamas’s victory ostensibly poses: either accepting (and thereby encouraging the region and the world to accept) an unreformed Hamas as a legitimate interlocutor or resorting to means that may undermine its own regional and international legitimacy.