The sequence of events that led to the confrontation at the jail in Jericho yesterday, and to protests, arson and kidnapping elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, is not entirely clear. But it seems likely that Hamas, still in the process of forming a government after its victory in the Palestinian elections, sensed that it could win a small victory over the Israelis by releasing the militants held in Jericho. The men include Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who the Israelis say ordered the killing of an Israeli minister, and Fuad Shobaki, who they say organised a big shipment of arms to the Occupied Territories that was intercepted at sea.
The group was originally transferred to Jericho as part of the deal that ended the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah in 2002. Arafat would not agree to their being seized by the Israelis, and the Israelis would not agree to let them go free, so the compromise was detention in a Palestinian prison under the supervision of British and American monitors. The Palestinian Supreme Court later ordered their release, as they had not been charged with any offence, to which the Israeli response was that, if they were, they would be the subjects of targeted assassinations. The men stayed in prison, in effect, to protect their lives. Britain, the foreign secretary said yesterday, felt that conditions in Jericho were too loose, as well as that our monitors might themselves be potentially in danger. What he did not say, but which can be speculated, is that Hamas may have calculated that in the new situation following the January elections and with a de facto ceasefire more or less holding, Israel might not carry out the assassination threat, so that it was now safe to release them. Jack Straw may have calculated that the British could not be party to that so it was better to withdraw.
The decision to pull out the monitors then triggered the Israeli action, and the Palestinian protests which followed. The unhappy consequence is that the prospect of achieving enough in the way of pragmatic agreements on different topics between the Israelis and the Palestinians to allow, at least for a while, co-existence without much violence has been damaged. So has the the standing of some western countries, particularly Britain, seen by many Palestinians as having colluded with Israel in the attack on the jail. Since they are prominent among the available mediators between Hamas and the Israelis, that is doubly unfortunate. The background to all this is that the structure which for years brought some order to the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is in almost total disarray. It was based on the assumption that there would be at some stage a final peace between two states, progress toward which would be pushed along by the international community, which would also provide enough economic aid both to keep the Palestinians from economic collapse and to give some leverage over Palestinian decisions. Successive Israeli governments dealt that structure a series of heavy blows.
Palestinian obstinacy and indecision also contributed, but the decisions of the more powerful society were much more critical. Hamas, which has only just brought itself to tentatively consider the two state solution which Ariel Sharon effectively junked, then took power from its discredited predecessor. The result is that Israel is now demanding of a Hamas government that it discharge the same role of preventing all physical threats to Israel that it earlier demanded of the much less intransigent Yasser Arafat and the PLO, but with absolutely no incentive for them to do so, except the possibility that the leavings of a unilateral partition of the West Bank will at some future point be labelled a