This article was originally published by Bitterlemons-international.org and is republished with permission.

The Hamas delegation, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, arrives back in Gaza after attending unity government talks in Saudi Arabia. (Maan Images)

The first year in government of Hamas, the first Arab Muslim political movement to be elected into power, has been an unmitigated disaster. Palestinians are poorer, further away from realizing their national aspirations and more isolated from the rest of the world than ever. Worse, for the first time since the Palestinian Liberation Organization's ignominious retreat from Lebanon, armed Palestinian factions turned their weapons against each other in significant numbers. Until the agreement in Mecca signed on February 8, and assuming it holds, Palestinians, especially in Gaza, lived under a threat of civil war.

However, it does not follow that this situation is the fault of Hamas. After all, the long downward spiral did not start with the election of the movement. Ever since the Al-Aqsa intifada broke out, Palestinians have been getting poorer and more divided, and are receiving less and less outside support, whether political or financial, with every passing year.

This is primarily because of the ever-increasing stranglehold the Israeli Army exercises over Palestinian lives, and the seemingly bottomless political and financial support Israel receives from the outside world. Indeed, even as Palestinian leaders met in Mecca to end internecine fighting and form a unity government, American and Israeli negotiators were involved in talks over future American aid to Israel; or rather, how much more the US is willing to give Israel beyond the annual $2.4 billion the country receives in military assistance.

Hamas erred in underestimating the level of hostility that greeted its victory in parliamentary elections last year, and not just from the US and its Western allies. Arab countries were anxious about the Islamic movement's success. Indeed, most Arab countries were unsettled by the Bush administration's aggressive democratization program.

And for good reason. For years it has been an accepted but unproven truth that should democratic elections be held across the Arab world, the victors would be the only viable opposition groups in those countries - namely the various incarnations of political Islam. Hamas' victory removed that supposition from the realm of the theoretical. What better way for Arab regimes concerned about their domestic oppositions to ease those fears than to see Hamas fail and fail spectacularly?

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The problem for Arab leaders is that Hamas didn't fail spectacularly. On the contrary, the international boycott served Hamas, as the movement could point to that as well as the Israeli occupation as the reason for internal stagnation. If anything, Hamas' popularity in the region has risen as the movement is seen as yet another victim of an intransigent West hostile not only to political Islamic movements, but to Islam itself.

Whatever the merits of that view, Washington's handling of Hamas is the latest in an impressive list of US policy mistakes in the Middle East. Rather than strengthening democratization processes across the region, the administration has weakened them. Rather than lessening hostility to America, the hostility is reaching unprecedented levels. Rather than furthering a peace process between Palestinians and Israelis, the US has rendered negotiations, let alone an agreement, almost impossible.

With Hamas, Washington missed a chance to signal to Muslims across the world that it is not hostile to mature Islamic political movements committed to the peaceful transfer of power through elections, only to extremists. It also lost the possibility of bringing Hamas into the orbit of negotiations with Israel - negotiations that may not have solved any final-status issues but would at least have stood a chance of being implemented by both sides and could have bolstered a cease-fire.

Indeed, the US-created hubris on all fronts in the region is serving notice to Arab leaders that they have to step in. Neither Jordan nor Egypt, the two Arab countries with a peace treaty with Israel, was happy about Hamas' victory. They did not support the boycott, but nor did they do anything to resist it. But Egypt, where relations between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood are increasingly antagonistic, has done its utmost to mediate between Hamas and Fatah and Hamas and Israel.

Jordan, having refused to receive any elected Hamas official in the year since the movement took power, belatedly tried to step in to mediate between Fatah and Hamas when the situation in Gaza threatened to spill out of control. The kingdom was too late, and instead Syria, briefly, took the mantle of peacemaker. However, the Damascus meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and exiled Hamas-leader Khaled Meshaal did not quell the fighting in Gaza. Instead, everyone's big brother, Saudi Arabia, threw its customary caution to the wind and presided over a Palestinian settlement in Mecca.

Some have accused Hamas of fighting windmills. By closing its eyes to international realities, critics especially in Fatah say, Hamas has brought this situation upon itself and all Palestinians. However, Fatah has failed to present any kind of alternative, primarily because the international community has failed to provide support for a credible solution. Thus, while neither faction stands to gain much by dividing Gaza and the West Bank between them, neither stands to gain much by not doing so.

A unity government is to be formed thanks to the Mecca agreement. However, it will be important to see if this government conforms to international conditions placed on the Hamas government it replaces. There is a chance the unity government could be dead in the water. That's why Arab leaders would be well advised to do their utmost to end the international isolation of the government agreed in Mecca.

Omar Karmi is a Jordan Times correspondent based in Jerusalem.

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