This article comes off of Haaretz. I can't get the link to work so I'm publishing the whole thing below. It gives a good sense of Israeli concerns and expectations.


"Does Hamas still want you dead?"

By Bradley Burston

Wednesday, 25 January (62 days to election day)

With the Islamic Jihad, you know where you stand.
They want you dead.

It's part of a worldwide movement of wanting you dead. They take
orders from people in Damascus who want you dead, people in Tehran who
want you dead, people south of Beirut who want you dead.

With Hamas, knowing where you stand is less cut and dried. With
infinitely more support, personnel, sitzfleisch, than the Jihad, with
more ideological independence, and a network of free medical clinics
and free schools, it almost makes you wonder about the Death to Israel
and Death to America and the second graders they dress up and parade
around in fatigues and miniature M-16's and garlands of plastic grenades.

Now as Hamas prepares to enter the Palestinian parliament, and perhaps
the cabinet, it's time to ask - Will the real Hamas please stand up?

Forget the learned punditry. It all comes down to this: Does Hamas, in
fact, want you dead?

On the one hand, there's Nouvelle Hamas, Hamas Lite, the latter-day
Islamic Resistance Movement of conciliatory if studiously ambiguous
statements.

The poster boy for the New Hamas is Sheikh Mohammed Abu Tir, he of the
leprechaun orange beard, who dispenses homespun medical advice as he
chats amicably, disarmingly with reporters on the Palestinian campaign
trail. The color of his beard and hair? Henna. It's proven itself good
for dandruff, he observes. Even seems to have helped ease the
migraines he once suffered.

Then there's Hamas Classic. The Hamas of Khaled Mashaal. No
negotiations. No clever wording. No part of "No" to misunderstand.

"We don't have to make concessions to satisfy Israel," Mashaal said
this week, "Our position now is not to negotiate with Israel. We will
not kowtow."

There was a time, starting with Hamas' founding at the very outset of
the first Intifada, when it was no problem to know where you stood
with them. They wanted you dead and/or gone from here. They had
decided that we were all either from Russia or America, and we could
all go back there now, thank you very much.

At first they weren't prepared to do anything about it. They were
later on, though. With a vengeance.

Either because we killed their master bombmaker with an exploding cell
phone to the ear, or in order to show their continued explosive
capability, or both, they decided to decide the 1996 election and put
Benjamin Netanyahu in power. It took them nine days. Four bombs,
Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. Sixty deaths. Hundreds and hundreds of
injured.

Feeling somewhat guilty about having helped them in the early 1980s,
when we thought them to be apolitical, anti-Marxist, useful, we tried
everything to stop them. Exiling 400 of them to a snowy, windblown
hilltop in south Lebanon, including their pediatrician/president Abdel
Aziz Rantisi, did nothing to deter them. We tried assassinating them,
pressing the PA to jail them, pressing the PA to stop releasing them
soon thereafter, assassinating them and assassinating them and
assassinating them.

Now we're at a loss. They're about to join the cabinet next door, and
there's nothing we can do about it.

Can we trust them? The question is academic. We won't trust them.
We'll give good reasons why not. Take Sheikh Abu Tir. Now 55, he's
spent most of his adult life in Israeli administrative detention or
otherwise jailed for weapons possession, membership in a terrorist
organization, and/or directing activities of Hamas' armed wing, Iz
al-Din al-Qassam.

"Israel respects us when we are strong," Khaled Mashaal told a
television interviewer. "This requires a long battle."

Any way you look at it, however, the battle has changed. The last time
Hamas launched a suicide bombing was in August, 2004.

The tone has changed as well. Even the unbending Mahmoud Zahar, whose
son was killed in an Israeli air strike and who narrowly escaped
assassination himself, has given a measure of ground in recent
statements.

"Negotiation is not a taboo," Zahar told reporters this week.
"Negotiations are a means. If Israel has anything to offer on the
issues of halting attacks, withdrawal, releasing prisoners... then
1,000 means can be found."

But a campaign is a campaign, and Zahar couldn't resist a dig at the
rival Fatah party. "The political crime is when we sit with the
Israelis and then come out with a wide smile to tell the Palestinian
people that there is progress, when in fact, there is not."

Oddly, the only moderating influence that seems to have consistently
worked on Hamas is Palestinian public opinion.

The group has entered politics, and even for those unafraid of a
martyr's death, there is little more terrifying for a politician than
his own constituents.

"You are about to enter the Authority. We welcome you," Fatah Gaza
leader Mohammed Dahlan told Zahar on the eve of the elections.

"It's time for you to discover the suffering of being in government."