"I believe very strongly that when you incorporate Hamas into the political system, you moderate their views immediately," Shikaki said. "You saw this with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and Egypt. Hezbollah has been able to have its cake and eat it too, but that's only because of Syrian and Iranian support. That's not the situation here, because the government wants to disarm Hamas."

Still, it is uncertain whether Abu Mazen has either the political will or the strength to do this. Palestinians close to Abu Mazen have suggested to me that he is prepared to draw Hamas in through diplomatic means but not confront them militarily. There are three reasons. First, he lacks legitimacy on the street. This is due to corruption within Fatah as well as Abu Mazen's political position. He does not have one clear constituency within Palestinian society, and he does not like to manipulate, so he will not play different factions against each other (as Arafat did) in order to maintain favor. Second, while he has a great deal of international legitimacy, he lacks international support. If the United States made a concerted effort to pressure Israel and back Abu Mazen, then Palestinians would back a military confrontation with Hamas. Finally, without U.S. support and an Israeli partner that believes in a equitable solution to the conflict (which even many Israeli observers agree Sharon does not), Abu Mazen's security forces have no impetus to take up arms against their Palestinian brothers. Palestinians do not share the West's distinctions between "good guys" and "bad guys." Even if Fatah and most moderate Palestinians do not agree with Hamas' tactics, they see Hamas as a legitimate organization fighting Israeli occupation, not as a cadre of terrorists.

A year ago I met with Mohammad Dahlan, Gaza's former security chief, and discussed his relationship with Hamas. Dahlan grew up with Hamas' leadership and attended university with them before the organization came into existence. Dahlan socializes with these men, drinks tea with them -- and throughout the Oslo years, it was his responsibility to arrest them and confiscate their weapons.

While men like Dahlan are not prepared to confront Hamas with violence (at least not without external support), they can reason with them. Abu Mazen has essentially told the militants: try it my way. Let's show the world that we are serious about instituting democracy, reforming the P.A., and curbing violence. Even if Israel undermines us in the short term, we'll secure international and U.S. support to pressure Israel to withdraw in the long term.

For the moment, Hamas seems to have agreed. At a summit in Cairo in mid-March, Hamas agreed to continue its hudna, or cease-fire, until the end of the year. In the interim, Palestinian factions would establish a "new PLO" that would include Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The new PLO would then assume responsibility for setting the Palestinian national agenda, including the possibility of negotiations with Israel.

But it is unclear how far the militants are willing to follow Abu Mazen before they tire of his diplomatic strategy. The success of the hudna depends on Israel's fulfilling its commitments: releasing prisoners, ending targeted assassinations and house demolitions, stopping closures, turning cities over to Palestinian control, and allowing no provocations or deviations from the road map. In that light, developments in Israel -- and Washington's response -- this week were extremely ominous.

The Sharon administration's plan to greatly expand Ma'ale Adumim, the West Bank's largest settlement, is the kind of unilateral action that could easily sabotage Abu Mazen's administration. The fact that the Bush administration, after initially criticizing the Israeli move, caved in and allowed Sharon to continue, was a severe blow to the Palestinian leader.

At the Cairo summit, settlement construction was classified as an "explosive issue" -- one that could lead to a renewal of violence against Israel. And this particular settlement construction could not be any more provocative. The 3,500 new homes would not only create a barrier between the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but would complete a circle of Jewish neighborhoods around East Jerusalem, in which the majority of the population is Arab. This encirclement undermines the possibility of one day establishing East Jerusalem, home to the third-holiest site in Islam, as the capital of a Palestinian state -- one of the crucial final-status issues, and probably nonnegotiable for the Palestinians and for the larger Arab world.

Though Israel maintains that physical changes to the landscape such as the security wall and even settlement construction (evidenced by the planned Gaza disengagement) are not necessarily permanent, Palestinians are extremely skeptical of such claims. And they know that these policies, aimed at creating "facts on the ground," only foment anger -- among the people as well as the extremists.

Yet Abu Mazen's ability to draw Hamas into the political system is another way of changing facts on the ground. As Shikaki says, once you integrate Hamas into politics, you quickly moderate them. Of course, he assured me, Hamas will never become Zionists. And though they have accepted the idea of a state within the '67 lines, they won't officially legitimize that decision. "But eventually the distinction between de jure and de facto will blur," he said.

Over the possibility of further Hamas violence, Jabril Rajoub was emphatic. "Fatah made a clear decision! Either we fight together or we negotiate together. On the ground we have one authority, one police, one institution. Hamas knows that in order to join the political process, they should accept the idea of a sole authority."

Perhaps the greatest hope for the Palestinians to navigate their way toward democracy and statehood lies in Abu Mazen's commitment to making clear decisions. You can't paddle in two directions at once, which is what Arafat had tried to do: simultaneously condemn and acquiesce to terror; appoint the arbiters of reform but imbue them with little authority; promise elections but withhold them indefinitely. Now, it seems Palestinians have grown tired not only of violence but also of this type of indecision. Of course, they will remember Arafat as a symbol of their struggle, the man who won them international recognition, but they will also see him as the man who failed to win a state for his people. In the reverence that surrounds it, as in its loneliness, Arafat's grave reflects both of these legacies.

"When Arafat died, every Palestinian felt something was lost," one young woman at the gravesite told me. "But Palestine isn't only him. It's a nation, and this nation needs to live."

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