How's Israel Reacting?

AP Via NYT: Israel Ponders Response After Hamas Win

Shock from the cabinet.

Before the vote, Israel had assumed Hamas would at best be a junior partner in the government, and formulated no public position on how to deal with it.

The militants' surprisingly strong showing threw officials scrambling into action.

Oops. Even if you thought that Hamas wouldn't win a majority of seats, why didn't the cabinet at least have a backup plan to deal with this? It makes no sense to me. To be caught totally unprepared. As for whether or not to deal with Hamas:

''After Hamas is elected, can the world not talk to them?'' former Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Army Radio. ''The world will speak to them saying that they were elected in a democratic process ... I think if we had prevented them from participating in the elections this wouldn't have happened.''

How true. Speaking of "prevented them from participating," this article told me something I did not know about the Oslo Accords. After all, they were before my time.

Mideast peace accords of the 1990s stipulated that no terror group could participate in Palestinian elections, but Israel was unable to drum up international support for barring the group from contesting the democratic vote.

You're kidding me right. You could have kicked them out?! They shouldn't even be eligable?! This can't be real. Unable to drum up international support? You don't think that the US and EU wouldn't have been behind an effort to keep them out of the election? You don't think Israel could have offered the withdrawl from Gaza in exchange for keeping Hamas off the ballot? These people have no idea what they're doing.

And all this with Israeli elections in just two months. And what does this do to that election? The obvious.

Political analyst Hanan Crystal said Hamas' election win would be the main issue in Israel's March elections, predicting it could hurt center-left parties and benefit the hawkish Likud, which opposed Israel's summer withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

I also have a feeling Kadima is dead. Kadima officials are going to be blamed for allowing this to happen. This is the worst-case scenario. Sharon is incapacitated, a terrorist organization has won a free and democratic election in the Middle East, and it looks like the Israeli elections are going to tilt things even more to the right. This could get messy.