Wasserman, the Boston Globe.

Nearly finished writing a piece on Palestinian reconciliation. At the moment, Abbas is walking tall.

All of this will have to be resolved where it began: members of the international community, notably the United States, will have to meddle. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Arabs hate the meddling of the West, the Palestinians want and need the Middle East Quartet (US, UN, Russia and the EU) in order to unify Gaza and the West Bank. Meddling can actually make peace as easily as it can break it. A glance in any direction—toward either expanding settlements in the West Bank or leveled buildings in Gaza—convinces most here that the Netanyahu government prefers a divided, and therefore feeble, Palestinian leadership. It is up to the great powers to, as Afif Safieh has phrased it, impose a solution whether Israel likes it or not. Every Palestinian I've met sure would.

And as it happens, Israeli citizens would like it, quite a bit: the last opinion poll of the Israeli public revealed that it is ready to end the unprompted spouts of al-Qassam rockets and negotiate a truce with the Hamas government.

So, to the simplistic question, “cui bono?” one could start by answering, “Israel.”

For Hamas it would be both an immediate victory and a long term defeat: in the immediate sense a unity government would allow Fatah to do all the things that Hamas is ideologically prohibited from doing, e.g. negotiating with Israel, while Hamas reaps all the practical benefits of a government that normalized Israeli-Palestinian relations. Although Hamas would not directly participate in peace negotiations with Israel, it has indicated that it would be willing to be part of a Palestinian coalition government with Fatah under which Fatah would negotiate the actual treaty.

However, rather than promising a permanent, and more potent, threat to Israel, throwing Hamas onto the world stage and bringing on the next election cycle could be the very thing that sends them packing. Either that, or the moderates in their group would finally win out, and the group would become just another Turkish-style political party with an Islamic inflection. With their popularity already plummeting, one would not expect the majority of Palestinians to continue to support a faction that promises them perpetual war rather than realistic compromise.

And obviously Fatah would be pretty psyched, retaining more power within the Palestinian Authority and continuing to receive endorsement from the IMF, World Bank and, depending on what happens in September, the United Nations.

Packing up for Britain in a few days.