The Palestinians’ Islamist movement, Hamas, is set to do well in next week’s parliamentary election. Will that hurt or help prospects for peace? WITH less than a week to go, the reality has sunk in. Every attempt to contain Hamas has had the opposite effect. When Palestinians elect a parliament on January 25th, for the first time in a decade, they are expected to give the Islamist movement a good proportion of seats, in a resounding protest vote against the failures of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling Fatah party, and against Israel. According to a poll published last week by Birzeit University, the “Change and Reform party€the banner under which Hamas has fielded its candidates for the 132 seats in the legislative council€would get 30% of the national vote, against Fatah’s 35%, the narrowest gap seen so far. That looks like the voters’ answer to Fatah’s infighting over candidacies, which produced a split in the party in December and ended in an untidy compromise between the warring factions: a list designed to soothe as many warring egos as possible instead of attracting as many voters as possible. Moreover, the poll may underestimate Hamas’s strength, since […]